Economic growth in much of Asia remains robust, the Asian Development Bank said. But trade and financial activity have already started to be eroded by the turmoil in Europe, and they risk being undermined further if the European debt crisis evolves into a full-blown financial and economic crisis like the one spurred by the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008.

“Things are changing very rapidly ”” not just weekly and daily, but hourly,” Iwan J. Azis, head of the development bank’s office of regional economic integration, said at a news conference in Hong Kong, as he presented the bank’s latest update on emerging East Asian nations.

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Charitable giving is trickling back up as the economy heals, but it could take years to return to pre-recession levels, nonprofit leaders say.

Giving totaled $291 billion in 2010, according to the 2011 annual report by the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University. That’s up 3.8 percent from 2009 and follows two consecutive years of declines.

This year shows little change. Charity Navigator, a Glen Rock, N.J., organization that evaluates nonprofits, anticipates donations will be flat during the holiday season.

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A key vote in Missouri Wednesday will decide whether to relax measures aimed at keeping gambling addicts out of casinos, the latest push by a cash-strapped state to make gambling restrictions less stringent.

The Missouri Gaming Commission is deciding whether to scrap a voluntary lifetime blacklist for problem gamblers and replace it with a five-year suspension. That would allow nearly 11,000 self-banned gamblers back into the state’s 12 riverboat casinos. The self-exclusion list, implemented in 1996, has been a centerpiece of Missouri’s efforts to manage gambling addiction, and has been emulated in at least eight other states””usually without the lifetime ban.

Several states have sharply increased betting limits since legalizing gambling. Colorado changed its maximum bet in 2009 to $100 from $5, and allowed casinos to operate 24 hours a day. Previously, they were required to close from 2 a.m. to 8 a.m. South Dakota raised maximum bets in 2000, and Florida last year eliminated its limit altogether.

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Hyperinflation didn’t lead to the rise of Hitler, but it undermined the legitimacy of the democratic Weimar Republic.

Millions of disaffected middle-class voters soon drifted to various splinter parties on the right. The center hollowed out, and subsequent coalition governments ruled on a tolerated-minority basis. German politics never really regained its balance in the mid-1920s, a time of relative economic stabilization — and then came the Great Depression, government austerity packages and, ultimately, the rise of the Nazis.

Never again, the thinking goes today. And rightly so. But the fate of the euro zone depends on which historical lesson one draws from this episode. Are there circumstances in which monetizing government debt is appropriate — or not?

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Newcastle’s Anglican Cathedral parish has been urged to become ”˜”˜entrepreneurial’’ after a failed attempt at a $100,000 lifeline to keep it afloat in 2012. Fund-raising options including charging visitors to view Newcastle from the cathedral tower could be considered, along with cutting at least $60,000 from its budget.

Diocese trustees, including former MP John Price and former Lake Macquarie mayor John Kilpatrick, refused last week to issue an episcopal certificate, or diocese guarantee, for a $100,000 bank loan, just weeks after questions at a synod about $43million in outstanding loans across the diocese.

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I would enjoy the goodwill and merriment of X-mas without reservation if I no longer felt it was co-opting and eclipsing my religious holiday. Lighting the Advent candles and reading daily devotions would provide a quiet respite during X-mas season. And on Christmas morning, instead of collapsing in an exhausted and mildly resentful heap, I could begin the real celebration with a full heart.

As a society, we need a designated time of year to celebrate with one another. We need the outlet of X-mas to give us a burst of festive energy to get through the winter. And we need fudge and Santa cookies, darn it. So let’s take Christ out of Christmas and make our culturewide secular celebration official. Just give me Jesus Day when it’s all over.

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The spectacular fall of Jon Corzine will be on display Thursday when the former New Jersey senator and governor testifies before a House panel on the bankruptcy of his former firm, MF Global.

Just months ago Corzine, a Democrat, was seen as a possible successor to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

So confident was MF Global in Corzine that its bond sale in August included a “key man” provision that gave investors an extra 1 percent in interest if Corzine left the firm “due to his appointment to a federal position by the president of the United States and confirmation of that appointment by the United States Senate prior to July 1, 2013.”

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MF Global Holdings Ltd.’s executive in charge of controlling risks raised serious concerns several times last year to directors at the securities firm about the growing bet on European bonds by his boss, Jon S. Corzine, people familiar with the matter said.

The board allowed the company’s exposure to troubled European sovereign debt to swell from about $1.5 billion in late 2010 to $6.3 billion shortly before MF Global tumbled into bankruptcy Oct. 31, these people said. The executive who challenged Mr. Corzine resigned in March.

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On Nov. 29, the Synod Council of the Anglican diocese of Ontario “suspended” four of its programs and ministries to create a “credible, balanced budget” for 2012. Cuts include the diocesan newspaper, Dialogue, as well as the diocese’s summer residential youth program, Camp Hyanto.

The decision is meant to “relieve the financial load on the diocese,” said the bishop of the diocese, Michael Oulton, in a letter issued to parishes Dec. 3.

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The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear a Bronx church’s case on whether it can hold worship services in New York City public schools.

The decision ends a 16-year legal battle over the rights of churches in city schools and means 160 area churches have roughly two months to find new places to hold worship services.
Lawyers for the Bronx Household of Faith, an evangelical congregation that meets at P.S. 15 in the Bronx, filed a petition in late September asking the court to review a June appeals-court ruling barring churches from holding worship services on school property.

Now that congregation, along with dozens of others, has until Feb. 12 to find a substitute house of worship.

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Excessive focus on money is destroying the environment and dehumanizing people, said Honduran Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga, president of Caritas Internationalis.

Religious communities have a duty to call attention to the importance of the human person, who is “at the center of creation,” he said while international leaders were debating the extension of legal limits on the production of greenhouse gas emissions.

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Standard and Poor’s has put Germany, France and 13 other eurozone countries on “credit watch” due to fears over the impact of the debt crisis.

S&P’s move means that countries with top AAA ratings would have a 50% chance of seeing their rating’s downgraded.

The news came as a surprise to investors and saw stocks fall back on early gains as the euro also fell.

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A list of the Episcopal Church’s 75 commissions, committees, agencies and boards spilled over eight PowerPoint slides during a recent presentation by its new chief operating officer, Bishop Stacy Sauls.

By his count, there are also nearly 50 departments and offices in the church’s New York headquarters, and 46 committees in its legislative body, the General Convention.

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We Americans fool ourselves if we ignore the parallels between Europe’s problems and our own. It’s reassuring to think them separate, and the fixation on the euro — Europe’s common currency — buttresses that mindset. But Europe’s turmoil is more than a currency crisis and was inevitable, in some form, even if the euro had never been created. It’s ultimately a crisis of the welfare state, which has grown too large to be easily supported economically. People can’t live with it — and can’t live without it. The American predicament is little different.

Government expansion was one of the 20th century’s great transformations. Wealthy nations adopted programs for education, health care, unemployment insurance, old-age assistance, public housing and income redistribution. “Public spending for these activities had been almost nonexistent at the beginning of the 20th century,” writes economist Vito Tanzi in his book “Government versus Markets.”

The numbers — to those who don’t know them — are astonishing. In 1870, all government spending was 7.3 percent of national income in the United States, 9.4 percent in Britain, 10 percent in Germany and 12.6 percent in France. By 2007, the figures were 36.6 percent for the United States, 44.6 percent for Britain, 43.9 percent for Germany and 52.6 percent for France. Military costs once dominated budgets; now, social spending does.

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In March 2008, about nine months after he bought a steel-processing business, Precision Steel Services in Warren, Mich., for some $750,000, Shailesh Kumar went to two banks in search of a $350,000 loan.

He wanted to expand the business and pay off a $290,000 debt he had with the seller, replacing an 8 percent, seven-year debt with a 6.5 percent, 20-year loan. “It would have made a huge difference in terms of cash flow and growth capital,” Mr. Kumar said.

But both lenders he was negotiating with demanded that Mr. Kumar put up equity in his own home as collateral. Mr. Kumar hesitated, and then as 2008 wore on, he watched the value of his home fall to $330,000 from $425,000, wiping out all of his equity. Eventually, the banks broke off negotiations. With no cash on hand and revenue down by some 60 percent during the first half of 2009, Mr. Kumar closed Precision Steel in July 2009….

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Over the past decade six of the world’s ten fastest-growing countries were African. In eight of the past ten years, Africa has grown faster than East Asia, including Japan. Even allowing for the knock-on effect of the northern hemisphere’s slowdown, the IMF expects Africa to grow by 6% this year and nearly 6% in 2012, about the same as Asia….

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Nearly one in five clients of Christian rescue missions said they were victims of physical violence within the past year, a 6 percent jump from the previous year, according to a new survey.

“It’s quite possible that the uptick in physical violence … is due to a friend or family member’s feeling of desperation and helplessness accompanying their unemployment and underemployment,” said John Ashmen, president of the Association of Gospel Rescue Missions (AGRM).

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There are several scales used, recently I have been following the CIA Factbook. No peaking, phoning a friend, googling etc.

When Hirshy Minkowicz was growing up in a Hasidic enclave of Brooklyn 30 years ago, he often noticed visitors arriving after dinner to meet with his father. They would withdraw into the study, speak for a time, then part with some confidential agreement having been sealed.

As he grew into his teens, Hirshy came to learn that his father operated a traditional Jewish free-loan program called a gemach. The visitors, many of them teachers in local religious schools, struggling to raise their families on small and irregular salaries, had been coming to borrow money at no interest and with no public exposure.

Now 39 years old and serving as the rabbi of a Chabad center near Atlanta, Rabbi Minkowicz has done something he never expected: open a gemach that deals primarily with non-Orthodox Jews in a prosperous stretch of suburbia….

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Anglican Diocese of Otago and Southland manager Bronwyn Miller said the New Zealand Anglican Insurance Board was working frantically to determine a way forward.

While Ms Miller could not speak for other denominations, she said all Anglican churches, and she expected all other churches in the Otago and Southland region, would be affected.

Anglican Insurance Board chairman Don Baskerville said cover would likely be found, but he was wary of the price of that cover. “The prices will be ugly,” he said.

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The number of students receiving subsidized lunches rose to 21 million last school year from 18 million in 2006-7, a 17 percent increase, according to an analysis by The New York Times of data from the Department of Agriculture, which administers the meals program. Eleven states, including Florida, Nevada, New Jersey and Tennessee, had four-year increases of 25 percent or more, huge shifts in a vast program long characterized by incremental growth.

The Agriculture Department has not yet released data for September and October.

“These are very large increases and a direct reflection of the hardships American families are facing,” said Benjamin Senauer, a University of Minnesota economist who studies the meals program, adding that the surge had happened so quickly “that people like myself who do research are struggling to keep up with it.”

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The sport-utility vehicle is making a comeback.

After being largely shunned during the recession, high-riding SUVs and workhorse pickups are regaining favor as U.S. consumers grow more confident and fuel prices remain below the $4 a gallon level that triggered a shift away from larger vehicles.

The rebound was clear Thursday as U.S. auto sales in November hit a 13.6 million annual pace, the strongest in more than two years, with sales of trucks and SUVs surpassing cars at many auto makers. The results are boosting Detroit auto makers that suffered when gas-guzzlers got the cold shoulder in 2008.

Makes this heart sad–read it all; KSH.

{Consumers are]…carrying less debt. The New York Federal Reserve reported this week that consumer debt had dropped by $60 billion in the most recent quarter as households “deleverage” to cope with tough times.

So how are some banks responding? They’re making it easier for people to run up balances on their credit cards.

In other words, they’re trying to get people to once again bury themselves in debt.

Case in point: Chase Freedom MasterCard holders are receiving notices that in addition to new benefits, their cards are being automatically switched from having credit limits to credit access lines ”” unless customers opt out of the change.

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“Just look at my screen. It tells the story. I have one big European bank willing to lend and 40 banks wanting to borrow. And look at those names, they aren’t little regional banks. They are some the biggest banks in the eurozone and they can’t get funding in the marketplace. They have to go to the ECB.”

–A trader as quoted in this morning’s Financial Times.

Google’s Chrome Web browser has leapfrogged Firefox to claim the number two slot in the browser battle, according to Web analytics firm StatCounter.

Chrome held 25.69 percent of the worldwide market in November 2011 compared with Firefox’s 25.23 percent. Internet Explorer remains the top browser globally with a 40.63 percent share of the market.

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Pseudoephedrine is found in over-the-counter cold medicines such as Sudafed. While these pills may provide relief to cold sufferers, to criminals who are in the business of making meth, these pills are gold. Meth-makers legally buy as much of the raw product as they can at local pharmacies and drug stores.

A federal law designed to crack down on methamphetamine abuse sets a hard limit on pseudoephedrine: No more than nine grams, or about seven packs, per customer each month. But to get around that limit, which is electronically tracked by drug stores in certain states, meth users will team up so that each can buy the maximum at once. [Deputy director Dan] Smoot explained that it’s a practice known as “smurfing,” named after the little blue cartoon characters, Smurfs, who are small, but mighty as a team.

Caught this one on the morning run. The video is highly recommended if you have time. Did you know that Kentucky is number 3 in America in Methamphetamine production? I didn’t. Read it all–KSH.

Wall Street executives, in a private meeting with a top Federal Reserve official in late September, recommended a coordinated effort by central banks to remedy the European financial crisis, according to Fed documents received in an open-records request.

The meeting, led by Louis Bacon, founder of hedge fund Moore Capital Management, preceded a joint action Wednesday by the world’s major central banks, which banded together to provide liquidity to the markets through cheap U.S. dollar loans….

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In reporting these observations, however, the Bureau is mindful that they are drawn from a non-random sample of roughly 5,000 credit card consumers.

First, many complaints show consumers struggling to understand the terms of credit cards and associated products like debt protection services. These show a mismatch between consumer understanding and product function or issuer practice.

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The world’s major central banks launched a joint action to provide cheap, emergency U.S. dollar loans to banks in Europe and elsewhere, a sign of growing alarm among policy makers about stresses in Europe and in the global financial system.

The coordinated action doesn’t directly address Europe’s government-debt and budget woes. Instead, it is aimed at alleviating the impact of those troubles on global markets. Moreover, it raises the prospect of other steps by central bankers to prevent a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis.

“The purpose of these actions is to ease strains in financial markets and thereby mitigate the effects of such strains on the supply of credit to households and businesses and so help foster economic activity,” said a statement issued by the six central banks””the U.S. Federal Reserve, the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the European Central Bank and the Swiss National Bank.

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Ten thousand combat veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder flooded into VA hospitals every three months this year, pushing the number of patients ill with the disorder above 200,000 and straining resources, Department of Veterans Affairs data to be released today show.

he increase is more than 5% per quarter, according to data obtained by USA TODAY, and it occurs as the VA struggles to move veterans quickly into therapy. New mental health patients at about a third of VA hospitals wait longer than the department’s goal of 14 days or less, according to a USA TODAY analysis published this month.

“Demand for mental health care is only going to continue to grow as thousands more troops return home,” said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., chairwoman of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee. “The VA still has work to do to decrease wait times, ”¦ reduce the stigma around seeking care and to provide access to care in rural areas.”

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