Borrowing costs for European governments jumped across the board Tuesday, and new data confirmed that the region’s economy is slowing , evidence on two key fronts that leaders of the euro area have yet to contain its stubborn financial crisis. The rise in interest rates hit Spain, Italy and — perhaps most worrying — France. French borrowing costs outstripped German costs, which serve as a regional benchmark, by the most since the adoption of the euro more than a decade ago. Read full article > >

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Jump in euro-zone interest rates hits France

The move by Russia was in retaliation for the adoption of a list that imposes sanctions on Russian officials.

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Russia Will Bar Some U.S. Citizens in Retaliatory Move

For two years I have been asking myself if I can take on the daily duties that accompany the adoption of another yellow Labrador retriever to replace the dog I lost in 2009.

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These three mompreneurs do circles around the mommy track

Verizon broke its single-day sales record for a device in about two hours today, the first day existing customers could purchase an iPhone on the network. As Engadget reports , between 3 and 5 a.m., Verizon sold more iPhones than it had sold of any other phone over a full business day. All the talk about other phones and platforms is good for the market. Android and Windows Mobile are looking better and better. App ecosystems are developing, etc., etc. But there is still something about the iPhone. People love the iPhone like they love a sports team or a piece of music. It is fundamentally irrational and beyond the reach of talk about features or price. When you want an iPhone, there is just nothing else that can scratch that itch. I wrote yesterday that it was hard to review the iPhone now because we didn’t know how many of the devices would end up flooding Verizon’s network. But the truth is that every time we’ve wondered if the iPhone would exceed expectations, it has, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Verizon executives are still shocked by the adoption rates that they get. To this day, there is no better explanation of the iPhone’s appeal than this viral video of an imaginary interaction between a phone customer and a would-be iPhone purchaser. For iPhone buyers, “It is the best phone” is the beginning and end of the smartphone story.

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The iPhone Effect

by Jamelle Bouie A lot of excellent commentary has come out of Ross Douthat’s quasi-attempt to justify the use of poor women as baby farms for infertile elites. Jill Filipovic notes that the “good” days of widespread adoption were terrible for the women involved, as they “were shipped off to boarding houses for pregnant girls” and forced to “donate” their child to a more “deserving” family. Likewise, Amanda Marcotte highlights the deep misogyny in treating women as little more than repositories for fetuses, “whose mental health is of no more consequence than the mental health of your X-Box.” On the other side of things, a somewhat supportive Andrew Sullivan has been posting reader letters—as is his wont—on adoption and its challenges. Of all the responses, this one is easily the best: …less than a month after we adopted our first child, our agency called us asking if we knew anyone at all with a completed home study. They had a healthy baby boy in a hospital and nobody willing to adopt him. (Agency rules didn’t allow us to take him before our first was completed.) For our second, the agency tried for days to contact us around Christmas since we were the only people on the list who were willing to take him. Why was it so hard to place them? Simple: the adoption market is built around healthy white infants. If you’re willing to remove even *one* of those conditions, the waiting list is short to non-existent. Everything about this gets a yes . A few responses complain that the adoption system is “broken,” but I’m skeptical. If you want to adopt a “desirable” baby—white and healthy—then I have no doubt that the process is incredibly difficult. But there are thousands of children—infants, toddlers, older kids—who need homes, and are easier to adopt, as the reader can attest to. The difference is that they are black or Latino, and potential adoptive parents—many of them white—don’t imagine themselves with a child of color. Which is fair; I don’t begrudge anyone who wants a child that looks like them, and there are real challenges to raising a child of a different race. For black children especially, white parents need to be able to help their kids navigate a complicated racial landscape. That said, with adoption as the topic du jour, let’s not pretend that the situation is similar for every child from every background. African Americans account for 32 percent of the kids in foster care, and they are far less likely than white ones to be adopted. If there is a problem with adoption in the United States, there it is. On a related note, you should read Terry Keleher’s Colorlines piece on raising a black boy as a single white man.

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Abortion, Adoption, and the ‘Right’ Kind of Kids

The crisis in the eurozone is leading, once again, to the adoption of policies such as bail-outs and austerity that belong to the neoliberal paradigm that partly precipitated the crisis. read more

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Despite Financial Collapse, Neoliberalism Holds Sway