Europe's job market has strengths the US doesn't - by Paul Wiseman and Christopher S. Rugaber

Compare unemployment rates, and America's job market looks much stronger than Europe's. The U.S. rate for August, being released Friday, is expected to be a near-normal 6.1 percent. In the 18 countries that use the euro currency, by contrast, it's a collective 11.5 percent.

Yet by some measures, Europe is doing better. It's been more successful in keeping people working, letting the disabled stay on the job and boosting the proportion of women in the workforce.

And Europeans in their prime working years — ages 25 to 54 — are more likely to be employed than Americans are.

Fewer than 77 percent of prime-age Americans have jobs, compared with 80 percent in Belgium, 81 percent in France and 82 percent in the Netherlands, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

If Americans 25 to 54 were as likely to be working as Germans the same age, 8.3 million more Americans would have jobs.

''Where we used to talk about the U.S. having a high-powered labor market in the late 1990s, Germany has that now,'' says Jacob Kirkegaard, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

It's true, of course, that the unemployed have a much harder time finding a job in, say, Spain or Greece than the United States. Spain's unemployment rate is nearly 25 percent. For people under 25, the rate tops 50 percent.

Though the eurozone's overall unemployment rate is 11.5 percent, individual countries include low-rate nations like Germany and Austria (4.9 percent) as well as some with much higher unemployment than the United States: Portugal (14 percent), Italy (12.6 percent), France (10.3 percent), Belgium (8.5 percent).

Yet Josh Bivens, research director at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, says America's relatively low ''headline unemployment rate is painting too rosy a picture of how the U.S. labor market is doing.''

The fall in the U.S. unemployment rate has been exaggerated by rising numbers of adults neither working nor looking for work. The government counts people as unemployed only if they're looking for a job. When many stop looking, the unemployment rate can fall even if few people are hired.

The share of Americans 16 to 64 either working or seeking work has fallen to 72.7 percent from 75.3 percent at the end of 2007, when the Great Recession began. In the 28 countries in the European Union, the figure has risen to 72.3 percent from 70.5 percent in late 2007. The United States and Europe calculate their employment rates in broadly similar ways.

No single reason explains why prime-age employment and workforce participation trends are weaker in the United States.

Read more: Europe's job market has strengths the US doesn't - Worcester Telegram & Gazette - telegram.com

ISIS "Terrorists and killers will be followed to the gates of hell and punished"

President Obama made his strongest statements yet against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) on Wednesday, promising that the U.S. will “degrade and destroy” the extremist group after they beheaded a second American journalist.
 
“Our objective is clear and that is to degrade and destroy ISIL so it’s no longer a threat—not just to Iraq but also to the region and to the United States,” Obama said, referring to ISIS by their alternate name.

On Tuesday, ISIS released a video of the beheading of Steven Sotloff, 31, a freelance journalist who worked for Time and Foreign Policy and was seized in Syria last August. His killer appears to be the same masked jihadist who killed James Foley exactly two weeks prior. The video’s authenticity was confirmed by President Obama and American officials early Wednesday.

Note EU-Digest: ISIS better remember what happened to Bin Laden..They will be followed to the gates of hell and will be brought to Justice !

Read more:President Obama: We will ‘degrade and destroy’ ISIS | MSNBC

EU-US Trade Negotiations: Bring on the defeat of the EU-US free trade deal - by Nick Dearden

In spite of previous suggestions to the contrary, the proposed EU-US free trade deal will, after all, include the NHS, trade minister Lord Livingston admitted on Monday.

The deal, known as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership or TTIP, is a priority of David Cameron’s government – a “once in a generation” opportunity. But officials have been taken aback by the extent of public hostility.

At the heart of this opposition is the fear that the TTIP will give big business vast new powers over public services like the NHS, and undermine rights at work, environmental protection and food safety standards. According to a poll commissioned by Unite, 68% of people in marginal constituencies oppose the inclusion of the NHS as part of the deal. Even among Tory voters, just 23% supported its inclusion.

After weeks of the government telling the public that “the NHS won’t be affected”, Lord Livingston has admitted that Cameron won’t exclude the NHS, because the TTIP is too good an opportunity to sell our “world class health services” to the US market.

This also means US health corporations would gain new “rights” to sell their health services here. And should they be impaired from doing so by, let’s imagine, a future government abolishing the Health and Social Care Act, those corporations will have the right to sue the British government through a parallel legal structure created by the TTIP. They won’t even have to go through our domestic court system.

Read more: Bring on the defeat of the EU-US free trade deal | Nick Dearden | Comment is free | theguardian.com

Sea Food: 91 percent of US seafood comes from abroad.

Set against the backdrop of the larger American food system, the seafood deficit, is, well, fishy. Many of the US most important landfoods are trending in the opposite direction. Corn, anybody? Plenty of it — surpluses of it, in fact. Beef? Enough domestic production to supply every American with around eighty pounds a year — five times the national per capita rate of seafood consumption.

Meanwhile, the paucity of domestic fish and shellfish in our markets and in our diets continues even as foreign seafood floods in at a tremendous rate. In the last half century American seafood imports have increased by a staggering 1,476 percent.

It gets fishier still. While 91 percent of the seafood Americans eat is foreign, a third of the seafood Americans catch gets sold to foreigners. By and large the fish and shellfish we are sending abroad are wild while the seafood we are importing is very often farmed. Two hundred million pounds of wild Alaska salmon, a half billion pounds of pollock, cod, and other fish-and-chips-type species, a half billion pounds of squid, scallops, lobsters, and other shellfish is, every year, being sent abroad, more and more often to Asia; untold tons of omega-3-rich seafood are leaving our shores to help other countries lower their rates of heart disease, raise their cognitive abilities, and lengthen their life expectancy.

American consumers suffer from a deficit of American fi sh, but someone out there somewhere is eating our lunch.

How did we land ourselves in such a confoundingly American catch?

Read more: American catch: The fight for our local seafood | GreenBiz.com

Ukraine crisis: Nato plans (not approved by France, Germany, Spain and Italy) east European bases to counter Russia - by Ian Traynor

NAT)O says it is to deploy its forces at new bases in eastern Europe for the first time, in response to the Ukraine crisis and in an attempt to deter Vladimir Putin from causing trouble in the former Soviet Baltic republics, according to its secretary general.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen said the organisztions's summit in Cardiff next week would overcome divisions within the alliance and agree to new deployments on Russia's borders – a move certain to trigger a strong reaction from Moscow.

He also outlined moves to boost Ukraine's security, "modernise" its armed forces and help the country counter the threat from Russia.

Rasmussen said: "We will adopt what we call a readiness action plan with the aim to be able to act swiftly in this completely new security environment in Europe. We have something already called the Nato response force, whose purpose is to be able to be deployed rapidly if needed. Now it's our intention to develop what I would call a spearhead within that response force at very, very high readiness.

"In order to be able to provide such rapid reinforcements you also need some reception facilities in host nations. So it will involve the pre-positioning of supplies, of equipment, preparation of infrastructure, bases, headquarters. The bottom line is you will in the future see a more visible Nato presence in the east."
Poland and the three Baltic states have been alarmed at the perceived threat from Russia and have been clamouring for a stronger Nato presence in the region. They have criticised what they see as tokenism in the alliance's response so far.

But the issue of permanent Nato bases in east Europe is divisive. The French, Italians and Spanish are opposed while the Americans and British are supportive of the eastern European demands. The Germans, said a Nato official, were sitting on the fence, wary of provoking Russia.

Note EU-Digest: This kind of rhetoric and sabre rattling will only increase the problems as it will be seen as provocative by Russia. The only solution seems to be a negotiated settlement which clearly defines the borders of Russia and EU-Member States and protects all ethnic minorities.

Read more: Ukraine crisis: Nato plans east European bases to counter Russia | World news | The Guardian

Traffic Fatalities: The world map of driving deaths

A new report from the International Transport Forum finds that the United States had more road deaths per capita in 2012 than Canada, Australia, Japan, and all of the European nations that reported data.

Read more: The world map of driving deaths - Vox

EU Economy: Europe fears deflation as Ukraine stays centre-stage

The eurozone's growing fears of deflation will be stirred again on Friday when preliminary consumer price data for August will be issued with signs that the European Central Bank (ECB) could be looking at bolder steps to help the region's stagnant economy.

Analyst polled by Reuters forecast the annual inflation rate to slip to 0.3 per cent from 0.4 per cent in July, falling even further below the ECB's target of below but close to two per cent and mired deep in what the bank calls the "danger zone." The ECB cut interest rates in June and promised banks cheap long-term loans starting in September and any new measures before those loans kick in had been considered unlikely.

However, in remarks that opened the door to possible policy action at the bank's next meeting in September, ECB President Mario Draghi said on Friday that the bank is prepared to respond with all its "available" tools should inflation drop further.

Speaking at a global central banking conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Draghi said he is confident that the steps already announced, helped by a weaker euro would boost demand in the ailing economic bloc. But in stronger language than he has used in the past, he stressed the central bank stands ready to do more. "The (ECB's) governing council will acknowledge these (economic) developments and within its mandate will use all the available instruments needed to ensure price stability over the medium term," he said.

The main weapon at the bank's disposal, printing money to buy bonds, known as Quantitative Easing (QE), is still opposed by Germany's Bundes bank which plays down the danger of deflation. In his remarks on Friday, Draghi did not mention the policy specifically, but a growing number of analysts believe it is only a matter of time before the ECB follows the path already trodden by the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England.

"The ECB will ultimately move to QE unless the euro weakens appreciably," said Riccardo Barbieri, chief European economist at Mizuho, adding that, "In the near term stagnation and near-zero inflation in the eurozone are almost a certainty. Developments in Ukraine will continue to be a major focus for markets, with the negative headlines of recent weeks having pushed German bond yields to new lows."

Read more: Europe fears deflation as Ukraine stays centre-stagEU Economy: Europe fears deflation as Ukraine stays centre-stag