The free clinic here opened about a year ago to serve illegal immigrants. But these days, it is mostly caring for Greeks like Vassiliki Ragamb, who was sitting in the waiting room hoping to get insulin for her young diabetic son.There will be plenty more stories just like this one. For years, the socialists have screamed about the greed of the wealthy and the corporations. They slandered anyone who opposed new social programs as being heartless and cruel. Well, the money is gone now because they couldn't be bothered making sure the money was earned before it was spent.
Four days earlier, she had run out of insulin and, without insurance and unable to pay for more, she had gone from drugstore to drugstore, pleading for at least enough for a few days. It took her three hours to find a pharmacist who was willing to help.
“I tried a lot of them,” she said, gazing at the floor.
In the beginning was the Word: and the Word was with God: and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him: and without him was made nothing that was made. In him was life: and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in darkness: and the darkness did not comprehend it.
Heart’s Home is an international Catholic non-profit organization that works to promote a culture of compassion around the world through a range of charitable and cultural efforts.There's lots more here. Here's a photo from where they live and work in Ecuador borrowed from their website.
With the unwitting help of Ruth Marcus, liberal Washington Post opinion writer, I have a suggestion for you: revive and increase the marriage tax.John makes some great points, but allow me to suggest that he's missing the underlying assumption which is the most amazing part of all.
“The marriage gap presents a real cost,” Marcus writes.If current trends hold, within a few years, less than half the U.S. adult population will be married. This precipitous decline isn’t just a social problem. It’s also an economic problem.That’s because the educated and rich are marrying more and getting richer; the uneducated and poor are marrying less and falling further behind. “Family structure,” Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution told Marcus, “is a new dividing line in American society.”
Specifically, it’s an income-inequality and economic-mobility problem. The steadily dropping marriage rate both contributes to income inequality and further entrenches it.
The year 2011 will be remembered as the year of failed summits. Governments proved themselves time and again to be failures at addressing the growing crises engulfing the world, whether the eurozone debacle, climate change, or budget politics in the US and Europe.So the folks we elected haven't managed to find a way to give us everything we want for free, stop all wars and control the weather. It all seems so simple. If only we had the right people in charge, these things wouldn't trouble us and we could go back to watching TV.
Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess who lived with her two dogs in a castle of ice. She was beset day and night by a terrible ogre who would not suffer her to leave the castle. It was terrible, especially when the smaller of the two dogs kept peeing on the carpet in the great hall.In truth, it is almost impossible to understand the European dilemma because it is so arcane – so weighed down with historical accretions and ideological obscurantism – that it has become impenetrable even to the principal players in what is turning into a tragedy of monumental proportions.Actually, it's not that hard to understand at all. It's pretty simple, really.
CAIRO—Islamist parties captured an overwhelming majority of votes in the first round of Egypt's parliamentary elections ... A hardline religious group that wants to impose strict Islamic law made a strong showing with nearly a quarter of the ballots, according to results released Sunday...My math says that's 61% for the Islamists with the even more Islamist hinterlands yet to vote. That would mean the hipsters picked up at most 39%. So much for being on the right side of history.
The High Election Commission said the Islamic fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party garnered 36.6 percent of the 9.7 million valid ballots cast for party lists. The Nour Party, a more hardline Islamist group, captured 24.4 percent.
The European Central Bank, U.S. Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the central banks of Canada, Japan, and Switzerland are all taking part in the operation, which is designed to "enhance their capacity to provide liquidity support to the global financial system."Yay! We're saved! The loans are all paid off and ... wait a minute. Nothing happened.
The ECB said in a statement the central banks were making it cheaper for banks to get U.S. dollar liquidity when they need it, starting next Monday. They are also taking steps to ensure banks can get ready money in any currency if market conditions warrant by establishing a temporary network of reciprocal swap lines.
The ECB said the central banks have agreed to reduce the cost of temporary dollar loans to banks — called liquidity swaps — by a half percentage point. The new, lower rate will be applied to all central bank operations starting on Monday.
Italy again had to pay investors yields averaging above 7% at its government bond auctions Tuesday, as the euro zone's third-largest economy continues to borrow at costs that forced Greece, Portugal and Ireland to seek external bailouts.
The auction of up to €8 billion in bonds over a range of maturities saw Italy paying a yield of 7.89% on three-year bonds and 7.56% on 10-year paper. Both marked new euro-era highs. That Italy had to offer higher yields on shorter-dated bonds at Tuesday's sale underscores how investors want to be compensated for the risk attached to the country's near-term fiscal outlook.
TOKYO—The International Monetary Fund warned in a new report that market concerns over fiscal sustainability could trigger a "sudden spike" in Japanese government bond yields that could quickly render the nation's debt unsustainable as well as shake the global economy.No country has done more to "stimulate" it's economy and "invest" in its future than Japan. Aging, debt-ridden Japan. If you thought it was a bad idea to loan money to those wacky Italians, then it might be bad idea to loan it to those sober Japanese, too.
The fund's Japan Sustainability Report, released on Wednesday, was a sihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifgnal to Tokyo policy makers that the international community is already worried about fallouts from Japan's potential fiscal problems, after debt problems in some European economies evolved into a Continent-wide crisis.
Japan's public liabilities amount to roughly twice annual economic output—a ratio worse than that of any other industrialized economy, including turmoil-hit Spain and Italy.
Hi! Jacob the Syrian Hamster here with a heartfelt Happy Thanksgiving for all and sundry! I'm not sure who sundry is, but I hope they have a great holiday.FRANKFURT—A German government debt auction drew some of the weakest demand since the introduction of the euro, signaling diminishing investor appetite for even the safest euro-zone assets amid Europe's worsening debt crisis.Germany couldn't find buyers for all of its bonds?
The German government was able to sell only €3.644 billion ($4.92 billion) of the €6 billion in 10-year bunds on auction for an average yield of 1.98%.
(Reuters) - Budget cuts that might once have sent French people marching into the streets look set to pass in silence as anxiety about debt and deficits, long non-issues in free-spending France, loom large in voters' minds ahead of a presidential election.I read a few German, Greek and Italian news site translations from time to time and the mood seems serious, but the tone is measured and even. The public is less sanguine. Judging by the muted reactions to these budget cuts and the slow-motion bank runs in progress, the Eurosocialist on the street is scared to death. Some idle speculation, based on nothing and probably dead wrong:
Just a year ago, unions staged spectacular protests against a two-year hike in the legal retirement age, mobilizing hundreds of thousands of demonstrators over many months, and in some places blocking access to fuel supplies.
The reaction was much less explosive this week after Prime Minister Francois Fillon unveiled France's second round of belt-tightening in just three months, intoning that the "hour of truth" had come to defend France's triple-A credit rating.
The five marks of the Roman decaying culture:Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), Author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
- Concern with displaying affluence instead of building wealth;
- Obsession with sex and perversions of sex;
- Art becomes freakish and sensationalistic instead of creative and original;
- Widening disparity between very rich and very poor;
- Increased demand to live off the state.
My daughter made the first cut for her high school soccer team. There's one more tryout session today and then the final cuts are tomorrow. Prayers are welcome!
With his experience as a former ECB vice president and above the fray of Athenian politics, Papademos’s arrival has been hailed both by Greeks and by EU leaders who had lambasted the country’s failure to enforce tax payments, sell state firms, raise taxes and slash public jobs, wages and pensions."Above the fray of Athenian politics" means "he's not one of our boys, blame someone else for all this nasty austerity stuff."
Greece and Italy—whose fiscal and political crises have set off ever-bigger scares among global investors—took concrete steps toward budgetary austerity Friday, helping soothe markets for the moment.We saw this kind of thing time and time again as Greece lurched from one rescue to the next, but with each rescue their bond rates ratcheted up. The rates would jump up, the rescue would come and the rates would fall back, but not as far as they rose. Inexorably, Greek rates went into the stratosphere while one rescue after another was heralded as the one that would save them all.
(ANSA) - Rome, November 11 - Emma Marcegaglia, the head of industrial employers' confederation Confindustria, on Friday pleaded with Italy's politicians to agree on the formation of a national unity government headed by Mario Monti.Meanwhile, the Italian parliament is throwing old folks and whole government agencies off a cliff in order to save the country.
She said the alternative to an emergency government led by the former European commissioner, snap elections, would be dangerous given the financial crisis enveloping the country...
"There are no alternatives (to an emergency government) because a three-month election campaign would ruin the country."
(ANSA) - Rome, November 11 - An austerity package paving the way for Premier Silvio Berlusconi to hand over the reins of command passed from the Senate to the House Friday as Italy gathered momentum in addressing its debt crisis."Liberalisation" means selling off government assets such as whole agencies and their jobs. "Slashing red tape" means removing regulations and regulators.
The package, which contains EU-mandated moves on pensions, liberalisation, administrative cost-cutting and slashing red tape, was passed by 158 votes with 11 nays.
