While near record low sovereign bond spreads and near record high equity prices have been taken as vindication by the European elites that all is well and 'we just need a little less fauxsterity' to be done with this crisis; the data, as it so often does, says the exact opposite. European unemployment just broke above 12% for the first time ever and European youth unemployment remains miserably above 24%. And while 1-in-4 under-25s unemployed is a bad enough statistic in terms of likely emergence of social unrest, the individual countries are in general deteriorating once again at a faster rate. French youth unemployment has risen for 13 months in a row to a record 26.5%; Spain (at 57.2% of under-25s unemployed) is catching up fast to Greece's stunning 59.1%; but perhaps the most concerning for the broader economies is the fact that Italy's youth unemployment has now topped that of Portugal at 38.4%. The only nation to see a drop in its youth unemployment was Ireland - which fell back modestly to January levels. Not a rosy picture, but then again, it doesn't matter...

An 8-year-old African-American boy in Texas is struggling to recover after being shot in the face by a 46-year-old white man, but authorities have not been able to determine a motive.

Dallas police said that Donald Maiden Jr., who had just celebrated his 8th birthday on Sunday, was playing tag outside his apartment complex on Tuesday. According to his grandmother, Maiden ran inside to get some toys and was shot as came back outside.

Witnesses told police that 46-year-old Brian Cloninger had been seen waiving a handgun at people prior to the shooting, The Dallas Morning News reported.

Police reports said that Cloninger was seen standing beside his pickup truck as the boy was bleeding, and a witness asked him if he shot the boy.

Police in Long Beach, California have opened an internal investigation about an incident involving a suspect who was tasered and brutally beaten by police even after he had been successfully subdued. According to the Los Angeles Times, 46-year-old Porfirio Santos-Lopez' teeth were knocked out, his right arm was broken, his left lung collapsed and both of his legs had gashes requiring stitches.

Although the national unemployment rate dropped from 7.4 percent to 7.3 percent in August, the number of Americans who actually held jobs during August dropped 115,000 from July.

The simultaneous decline in both the unemployment rate and the number of people with jobs was possible because the "labor force participation rate" dropped to 63.2 percent in August. That is the lowest it has been since August 1978.

The labor force participation rate is the percentage of adults 16 years or older who either had a job or actively sought one in the last four weeks.

The unemployment rate is the number of adults in the labor force (n.b. they had a job or were actively seeking one) who could not find a job.

At a Town Hall meeting a Syrian woman who lost a member of her family at the hands of the U.S. backed Syrian rebels that would benefit from a U.S. strike against Syria, one that AZ Senator John McCain supports, rips into him about spilling more Syrian blood.

To my fellow sailors, shipmates and service members on active duty,

Many of you are now in the Mediterranean Sea near Syria to be used to carry out strikes against the country. 91 percent of the American public opposes these strikes. The Obama administration has failed to produce the "evidence" it says would justify them.

Do not be fooled into yet another war based on lies in the Middle East. The events that came to pass in Iraq and Afghanistan go to show that "defending freedom and democracy around the world," as the Sailor's Creed so wrongfully suggests is just a scheme to defend the interests of the rich at our expense. Syria - which is the only remaining country in the Arab World that is independent of Wall Street - is a huge prize for the oil and defense industries. But the billionaires who will profit don't send their own children. They send us.

What we learned from the Iraq war in particular is that the U.S. government will fabricate intelligence, lies to our faces, and create a false story about "protecting civilians" to cover-up their true motives.

Don't be a part of a war machine that kills innocent lives and separates entire families. Tomahawks and MK 45 rounds kill indiscriminately.

Do not be fooled into yet another endless watch, duty day, sleepless night and deployment in support of a corrupt system that constantly puts you in harm's way. I ask you, is it really worth it?

Down the road from the Maker's Mark bourbon distillery in the central Kentucky town of Loretto, a feisty cadre of nuns has been tending crops and praying since the early 1800s. An order founded on social justice, the Sisters of Loretto are quickly becoming the face of a new grassroots campaign against what they see as a threat to holy land: the Bluegrass Pipeline. The 1,100-mile pipeline will carry natural gas liquids from the Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia fracking fields, and will pass through Kentucky - eventually connecting with an existing pipeline that runs all the way to the Gulf Coast.

The pipeline is in its early stages of development, but the nuns have already refused to allow company representatives to survey their 800-acre campus, and they are taking their message to local community meetings ... sometimes in the form of song.

A MYSTERY object that fell from the sky left a medical teacher shocked after the debris shattered her car's windscreen as she drove across the Forth Road Bridge.

Surgeon Liza McLornan was driving home from work at Dunfermline's Queen Margaret Hospital on Friday afternoon when the freak accident occurred.

The 40-year-old Murrayfield resident was halfway over the bridge at 3.45pm when the unidentified object landed on her Mercedes Benz 320 saloon, shattering the passenger side of the windscreen and spraying glass shards across the front seat and her lap.

Ms McLornan said she had spotted the "white, silver" object falling from the air a fraction of a second before it hit her vehicle.

That brief sighting of the missile was the only glimpse she got.

Seattle police said this afternoon the shooting of a woman last night by an officer was unintentional.

According to police, the officer was pulling out his handgun when it accidentally discharged, hitting the woman in the leg. She suffered a wound that is not considered life-threatening, police said.

Police say the woman was not armed.

The incident began just before 11 p.m. when a man called 911 from a motel near North 120th Street and Aurora Avenue North and reported hearing an incendiary device detonate The man then hung up.

As police responded to the scene, one officer spotted a 19-year-old woman punching another woman on the sidewalk near 120th and Aurora. When one of the women ran off across the street, the officer jumped out of his patrol car and chased her, police said.

He approached the woman in the parking lot of a nearby business and the woman refused to show her hands, prompting the officer to draw his firearm, police said. While drawing his gun, the officer unintentionally fired one shot, police said.

"The officer immediately radioed for medics and offered his apologies to the woman for the very regrettable incident," police said in an account of the incident posted online.

Because the woman was a suspect in an assault, officers ran her name and learned she was wanted in Snohomish County on several felony warrants, police said. Seattle police contacted Snohomish County authorities, who requested that Seattle police book the woman into jail for the warrants.

Homicide/Assault detectives are investigating the shooting and have placed the officer's duty firearm into evidence. As per department policy, the 29-year-old officer - who has been with the Seattle Police Department for a year and a half - has been placed on administrative leave.

Police have determined the original report of an incendiary explosion was a false report made by an individual believed to be suffering from mental health issues.

The Wunderlich family, with Michael Farris of the HSLDA.

'Officers brought a battering ram and were about to break the door in'

Four children, ages 7 to 14, have been forcibly taken from their Darmstadt, Germany, home by police armed with a battering ram, and their parents have been told they won't see them again soon, all over the issue of homeschooling, according to a stunning new report from the Home School Legal Defense Association.

HSLDA, the world's premiere advocate for homeschoolers, said the family of Dirk and Petra Wunderlich has battled for several years Germany's World War II-era requirement that all children submit to the indoctrination programs in the nation's public schools.

The shocking raid was made solely because the parents were providing their children's education, HSLDA said. The organization noted the paperwork that authorized police officers and social workers to use force on the children contained no claims of mistreatment.

"The children were taken to unknown locations," HSLDA said. "Officials ominously promised the parents that they would not be seeing their children anytime soon."

The raid, which took place Thursday at 8 a.m. as the children were beginning their day's classes, has been described by observers as "brutal and vicious."