Scrolling around...December 8, 2012

1000 Nigerians flee after Boko Haram killings
More than 1,000 Nigerians have fled to neighbouring Niger after six people were killed in an attack on their village blamed on Islamist group Boko Haram, the United Nations said Thursday.

The 1,042 refugees crossed the northern border into the Niger region of Diffa after the November 30 attack, and have been taken in by families in two villages near the regional capital, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a bulletin.

A teacher in the village confirmed the attack to local media. He said the attackers told villagers they were looking for “politicians” and “coldly killed” six people, including a police officer, after the victims were unable to recite verses of the Koran...

Number Of Workers Aged 25-54 Back To April 1997 Levels.
When people think of the conventional battery of options the BLS applies to fudge the monthly payrolls number, the labor force participation is the first thing that comes mind: after all the thesis is that old workers are increasingly dropping out of the labor force and retiring. Nothing could be further from the truth as can be seen in this chart of workers aged 55-69, i.e. the prime retirement age. But perhaps a far more important secular issue is the complete lack of pickup in the prime worker demographic, those aged 25-54, which in November dropped by 400k to 94 MM. This is a level first breached in April 1997, in other words in the past 15 years not a single incremental job has been gained in this most productive and lucrative of age groups!...

Obamacare May Hike Your Pet’s Health Care Bills
...According to a rule published Friday by the Internal Revenue Service, some medical devices used in veterinary practices will be hit by Obamacare’s 2.3 percent device tax. Many of their manufacturers are expected to hike prices, meaning higher veterinary costs for the nation’s pet owners...

Charities could be losers in ‘fiscal cliff’ tax fight-Proposal would end deductions
In the fiscal feud between President Obama and Republican lawmakers, economists agree that Washington could raise several hundred billion dollars by limiting tax deductions and closing loopholes for the wealthy, but charities likely would take a big hit in donations...

Supreme Court will hear DOMA, Proposition 8 cases
All nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court announced on Friday that they will hear two cases dealing with same-sex “marriage” in 2013, examining whether the U.S. Congress or the voters in any state have the right to preserve the traditional definition of marriage...

Sweden forces girls n’ guns, boys n’ dolls ads
Toy makers are being pressured by a Swedish advertising watchdog group to produce gender-neutral Christmas toy catalogs...

Single Belles, Single All the Way: The marriage gap is a problem we can’t afford to ignore.
...Until about 1970, the percentage of the adult population in America that was married never dipped below about 93 percent. Since then, marriage has been steadily declining. Today, about half the population is single. The unmarried represented about 40 percent of the electorate, and they broke heavily for Obama — by 16 percentage points among single men and 36 percentage points among single women — giving him two-thirds of his margin of victory. (By contrast, Romney prevailed among married voters by 56-42.)

The marriage gap is also an education gap in America. Those with little or no college, and particularly those without a high-school diploma are shunning marriage in favor of cohabitation. The college-educated, by contrast, are still marrying at close to the rates they did in the 1950s (though later in life, which contributes to lower fertility)...

Berkeley students seek Christmas ban on Salvation Army bell ringers

School removed God reference from first-grader’s poem
An elementary school in North Carolina censored a first-grade student’s Veterans Day poem by removing a line that referenced her grandfather’s belief in God.

The West Marion Elementary School student was supposed to read the poem at a Nov. 8 Veterans Day ceremony to honor her grandfather, a Vietnam veteran.

The deleted line read: “He prayed to God for peace, he prayed to God for strength.”...