Greece's jobless rate rose to 27.9 percent in June from 27.6 percent in May, reflecting the impact of a six-year, austerity-fuelled recession, the country's statistics service ELSTAT said on Thursday.
The reading was more than twice the euro zone's average of 12.1 percent in July, and the highest since ELSTAT began publishing jobless data in 2006.
Two alleged home burglars picked the wrong Gwinnett County house to break into Thursday morning. Not only was the homeowner inside, but he was armed with a gun, police said.
Around 11 a.m., the homeowner, whose name was not released, called 911 to report that two suspects were attempting to break into his home, according to Cpl. Jake Smith with Gwinnett police. Moments later, while the homeowner was still on the phone with 911, one of the suspects forced his way into the home through a window, Smith said.
“The homeowner retrieved a handgun and fired at the suspect, striking him,” Smith said in an emailed statement. “Both suspects retreated to a black passenger car and fled the scene.”
By the time officers arrived, the two suspects were gone. But around 11:30 a.m., officials at the Gwinnett Medical Center, Duluth campus, told police a man matching the description of a suspect had entered the hospital wounded, Smith said.
The injured suspect, Tajh Guillont, 22, was taken to surgery in serious condition. His condition was not known late Thursday.
For better or worse, a truism of American politics is that voters vote their pocketbooks. Yet according to a new report on median household incomes by Sentier Research, in 2012 millions of American voters apparently cast ballots contrary to their economic self-interest.
Each month the consultants at Sentier analyze the numbers from the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey and estimate the trend in median annual household income adjusted for inflation. On Aug. 21, Sentier released "Household Income on the Fourth Anniversary of the Economic Recovery: June 2009 to June 2013." The finding that grabbed headlines was that real median household income "has fallen by 4.4 percent since the 'economic recovery' began in June 2009." In dollar terms, median household income fell to $52,098 from $54,478, a loss of $2,380.
What was largely overlooked, however, is that those who were most likely to vote for Barack Obama in 2012 were members of demographic groups most likely to have suffered the steepest income declines. Mr. Obama was re-elected with 51% of the vote. Five demographic groups were crucial to his victory: young voters, single women, those with only a high-school diploma or less, blacks and Hispanics. He cleaned up with 60% of the youth vote, 67% of single women, 93% of blacks, 71% of Hispanics, and 64% of those without a high-school diploma, according to exit polls.
According to the Sentier research, households headed by single women, with and without children present, saw their incomes fall by roughly 7%. Those under age 25 experienced an income decline of 9.6%. Black heads of households saw their income tumble by 10.9%, while Hispanic heads-of-households' income fell 4.5%, slightly more than the national average. The incomes of workers with a high-school diploma or less fell by about 8% (-6.9% for those with less than a high-school diploma and -9.3% for those with only a high-school diploma).
North Carolina Republican lawmakers cracking down on voter fraud have been getting the Texas-treatment lately from liberal mouthpieces who see racism under their beds at night, but an election case out of the college town of Winston-Salem puts things in a different light.
A city council race is spurring complaints that a Democrat candidate is getting help from a professor and college students at a historically black university who are casting votes without being legal residents.
Is Rachel Maddow crying racism here?
Is The Nation putting it on its cover?
No.
The griping is coming from black Democrats, according to the Winston-Salem Journal.
According to complaints filed with Winston-Salem State University, political science professor Larry Little let a candidate for re-election to the Winston-Salem City Council speak to his class last week, then let students out of class so they could go to an early voting site to cast Democrat primary votes, in transportation arranged by the councilman
That councilman was a former student, who won his first term in 2009 when the professor was his campaign manager. The pair defeated a long-time Democrat councilwoman in a low-turnout primary where student votes made the difference.
All that sounds too chummy even for other Winston-Salem Democrats, according to the Winston-Salem Journal.
The historically black university has appointed a committee to investigate Little’s behavior, but the fact that its three members includes the university’s director of public relations tells you this is being treated more as a black eye to the campus than a case of the kind of electoral fraud North Carolina Republicans say they’re trying to stamp out.
Some students toted lunchboxes to the first day of school in Boston this week, but district administrators are expecting that could become a more unusual sight as parents learn about a federal program that is now providing all public school students in the city with free breakfast and lunch.
The nation's oldest school system has joined a program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture that has spread to 10 states and the District of Columbia that offers students two free meals every school day, whether or not their families can afford them.
"It's one less weight and one less burden for parents," said Joshua Rivera, whose son is a second-grader at the Maurice J. Tobin School in Boston's Roxbury section.
Known as Community Eligibility Option, the program is part of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010. For schools to qualify, federal officials said, more than 40 percent of students have to be getting food stamps or aid through certain other federal assistance programs.
Besides easing hunger, school officials said, the program eliminates the expense and time of handling paperwork for students who qualify for reduced or free meals and also helps erase a stigma that plagued some students from poor families.
There has been a 60 per cent increase in the amount of ocean covered with ice compared to this time last year, they equivalent of almost a million square miles.
In a rebound from 2012's record low an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia's northern shores, days before the annual re-freeze is even set to begin.
The Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific has remained blocked by pack-ice all year, forcing some ships to change their routes.
A leaked report to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) seen by the Mail on Sunday, has led some scientists to claim that the world is heading for a period of cooling that will not end until the middle of this century.
If correct, it would contradict computer forecasts of imminent catastrophic warming. The news comes several years after it was predicted that the arctic would be ice-free by 2013.
Despite the original forecasts, major climate research centres now accept that there has been a “pause” in global warming since 1997.
The streak is still alive.
The city of Newark continued its awe-inspiring murder streak Thursday evening with its tenth homicide in as many days. A 14-year old boy, Ali Rajohn Eric Henderson, was gunned down in the courtyard area of Riverview Terrace Housing Complex. Heroin and weapons were reportedly found in Henderson’s bedroom.
It looked like a close call Thursday as to whether Newark would be able to continue its recent streak of nine murders in nine days or would drop below its 1.0 per day murder rate for the ten-day period, but the city, as always, rose to the occasion, hitting double-digits.
The NYPD says thugs are beating and mugging bike riders on a popular Manhattan bike path.
The victim of one attack recently came forward to tell fellow riders to be on guard, CBS 2’s Don Champion reported Tuesday.
The bike path along the Hudson River is popular with New Jersey bikers who take the route and cross the George Washington Bridge to get home at night in the dark.
One victim told Champion he’s always on guard, but was not expecting what he got when he turned one corner.
“It’s a little surreal,” said Keith Cho, who had one eye swollen shut. “It was very traumatic. I’ve never been jumped before.”
A rope mark burned into his neck detailed the reason behind Cho’s newfound sense of insecurity.
"A great democracy does not make it harder to vote than to buy an assault weapon,"
Police in Wilmington are investigating the reported gang rape of two women at a park in Delaware. Police say two women, ages 32 and 24, were reportedly attacked and sexually assaulted by a group of 10 to 12 black male juveniles in Kosciuszko Park at about 6:54 p.m. Thursday. According to police, the suspects, who range in age from 12 to 17-years-old, remain on the loose........
It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way, was it? In 2011, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Plata that California must reduce overcrowding in the state’s prisons, overcrowding so severe that the Court — or five members of it, anyway — found that it constituted cruel and unusual punishment and thus violated the Eighth Amendment. The “Brown” of the case is California Governor Jerry Brown, who when faced with the predictably grim prospects demanded by the decision, saw through the legislation and implementation of what has been labeled “Public Safety Realignment.” This innocuous term is of course government-speak for “realigning” people out of prison where they belong and onto the streets of California’s cities, with the greatest share of them coming to roost in and around Los Angeles.
It’s impolite to say “I told you so,” but sometimes good manners must give way to good sense. I’ve visited this topic on three previous occasions here on PJ Media, in each case referring to the predictable consequences of failing to punish people for proscribed conduct. Today, fewer felons are in California’s prisons, perhaps making life a bit more tolerable for those who are so confined, but making life all the more intolerable for the rest of us. In 2011, 50,678 people were sent to state prison in California. The following year, after all that “realignment” started happening, the number fell to 33,990.
Though Governor Brown and the lesser lights of California politics have sought to put a glad face on what has happened since, the inescapable truth is that crime in California, after years of decline, is on the rise once again.
For just one example, look at the website of the California State Department of Justice, on which appears a chart depicting trends in violent and property crimes for the last 30 years (a period that happens to roughly coincide with my career as a police officer). Both lines on the graph indicate a fairly consistent downward trend in crime — that is, until one looks at 2012, when both lines ticked upward.
What could have happened in 2011 that explains this? Puzzling.
Washington already has the nation's highest state minimum wage at $9.19 an hour. Now, there's a push in Seattle, at least, to make it $15.That would mean fast food workers, retail clerks, baristas and other minimum wage workers would get what protesters demanded when they shut down a handful of city restaurants in May and others called for when they demonstrated nationwide in July.
So far, the City Council and mayoral candidates have said they would consider it in the famously liberal city. One said, however, that it may not be soon.
Venture capitalist Nick Hanauer said there's no time to waste. What the nation needs is money in the hands of regular consumers. "A higher minimum wage is a very simple and elegant solution to the death spiral of falling demand that is the signature feature of our economy," he said.
The IPCC admits that it doesn’t have a sure answer to a vexing question: Why has warming slowed a bit in the past decade or so? With medium confidence, the draft suggests that the explanation lies in a mix of natural variations and things such as the oceans absorbing more heat or more volcano debris reflecting sunlight back into space. It’s also possible, the scientists admit, that the planet’s sensitivity to greenhouse emissions is lower than middle-of-the-road projections.
Unless the IPCC’s report changes drastically between now and next month, the bottom-line message will be clear. Some uncertainties are inevitable when humans try to comprehend an incredibly complex climate system. Scientists might not be able to answer some questions for years, until they can look back at what changed after so much carbon dioxide entered the atmosphere so quickly. Those inevitable uncertainties are all the more reason for governments, starting with the United States’, to head off the ample risks of continuing to release huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the air and to set about it with speed and ambition.
Blue states like California and Illinois are struggling meeting obligations for their own public pension funds, so they certainly don’t need this latest bit of news—their tax bases are shrinking drastically. A new study on state-by-state income migration from the Tax Foundation (h/t WSJ), found that New York, California, and Illinois—the largest blue states in the country—led the country in income flight during the last decade. New York was hit particularly hard, losing $46 billion dollars of taxable income to people leaving the state over the past ten years. And these states were not alone: blue stalwarts like Maryland, New Jersey, and Massachusetts were not far behind.
Red and purple destinations like Florida, Texas, Arizona and North Carolina led the pack of states benefiting from this migration, each gaining over $10 billion in taxable income due to new migrants from other states. Although the red/blue divide breaks down somewhat towards the middle of the group—red states like Louisiana saw some minor losses while blue states like Vermont enjoyed modest gains—the overall pattern is hard to miss.
One of the trends driving blue boosters to despair is that the most extensive government programs require taxes hikes which tend to cause businesses to flee, eventually taking residents and their tax dollars with them. This erosion of the tax base forces states to hike taxes further to keep the system running which only accelerates the process. The pension crises in states like California and Illinois suggest that this cycle may be reaching some sort of natural climax. Reversing the trend will require some gut-wrenching changes to business-as-usual.
Earlier this month it was reported that the number of Americans renouncing their citizenship increased sixfold in the second quarter compared to last year. According to The Wall Street Journal, more Americans renounced their citizenship in the first two quarters of 2013 than the whole of 2012 combined. The increase comes ahead of a July 2014 deadline (which has been moved back six months) imposed by an absurd piece of legislation called the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), which compels foreign financial institutions to disclose the holdings of their American customers to American authorities as part of the U.S. government's latest attempt to crack down on Americans who avoid taxes by keeping assets abroad.So if you are the state of New York, just keep yapping about how you don't want Rush Limbaugh as a resident and poof! he'll be a Florida resident in the blink of an eye.
Of course, American authorities can’t legally force a foreign entity to do anything. However, they can threaten to impose a 30 percent withholding tax on income from American sources on a foreign financial institution if those institutions don’t comply with the U.S. Treasury Department’s demands, thereby turning foreign businesses into an IRS enforcement tool. The recent news of the huge increase in the number of Americans renouncing their citizenship is only the latest reminder of not only the arrogance of the IRS but also of the fact that American tax laws place an unreasonable burden on American who live abroad.
One of the most notable instances of an American renouncing his citizenship is Eduardo Saverin, the Brazilian-born co-founder of Facebook, who has lived in Singapore since 2009. Ahead of Facebook’s IPO Saverin renounced his American citizenship, although Saverin denied that his decision was based on economic incentives. Saverin’s decision upset some legislators on Capitol Hill, and prompted Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and some of his colleagues to sponsor a bill, which died in committee, called the Ex-PATRIOT Act, which would have punished Americans who chose to make the rational decision to take legal means to move assets and wealth abroad in an attempt to hand over less money to the government. One of the most objectionable parts of Schumer’s Ex-PATRIOT Act is its title. While perhaps a clever backronym, the implication that you must be somehow unpatriotic for living abroad or for choosing to take legal means to lower your tax bill is disrespectful and symptomatic of a worrying attitude towards the relationship between citizens and their government.
A Dunkin’ Donuts worker was beaten and pistol-whipped Tuesday by a Florida couple enraged over a botched coffee order, police report.
The 1 PM melee at the Lauderhill eatery resulted in the arrest of Jeffrey Wright, 27, for aggravated battery, a felony. Alexis Longo,right’s 22-year-old wife, was charged with misdemeanor battery.
According to a Lauderhill Police Department report, the couple placed a drive-thru order that they later discovered contained the wrong coffee. Longo wanted her java with vanilla. Instead she got caramel.
So the pair parked their vehicle and went inside the restaurant to speak with a manager. Before that could occur, the pair got into an argument with the worker who had handled their order. Matters quickly escalated and Wright and Longo allegedly began assaulting the employee.
