Free Republic

It's jobs week in America. Yesterday, ADP told us that US companies added 170k jobs in January. Today, Challenger Gray tells us about job cuts and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) tells us about initial unemployment claims. Tomorrow we get the official BLS nonfarm payroll and unemployment rate figures through January 2012. But all of this week's jobs data is short term in scope. The Bureau of Labor Statistics just published it's employment projections for 2010 to 2020, which includes a list of the 30 jobs that will grow fastest through 2020. Eleven of the 30 jobs require a...

As more Chinese turn to Christianity, the state is torn between embracing its benefits and the desire to assert control. Every night, when Yang prays with her seven-year-old daughter, she knows that she is doing something illegal. Like millions of other Chinese Christians, Yang refuses to be a member of one of the official state-sanctioned churches. Instead, she gathers twice a week with two dozen other Protestants in a private living room to pray and sing - far away from the gaze of the Communist Party. She says she is not opposed to the Chinese government at all, but just...

The Big Easy is making a big comeback. New Orleans has steadily won back some of the population it lost in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, according to a government report released Wednesday. New Orleans lost more than half its residents during the deluge. Few large U.S. cities have ever had to cope with disaster on that scale. Since then, it has been one of the country's fastest growing cities. Only a couple of instances can compare. Galveston, Texas, was also devastated by a hurricane in 1900, a storm that remains the most lethal natural disaster in U.S....

“This could be a church,” he muttered. “Lord, that is the place.” Mr. Florian, a factory worker by day and a pastor by night, was desperate to find a home for his small congregation...Now, on most nights when the neighborhood winds down to rest, the fluorescent lights inside the room flicker to life, and the spartan, whitewashed space rattles under a sonic barrage of prayers, yelps and tambourines. As a teenage band pounds out bouncy Latin rhythms, men in crisp business suits that belie their dreary day jobs triumphantly pump their fists. Women in flowing skirts shout, stomp and gyrate...

Catholic, Mormon, and Pentecostal Churches Fastest Growing Associated Press NEW YORK (AP) - The Assemblies of God, the Mormon church and the Roman Catholic Church were the fastest-growing major denominations in the United States last year, according to the just-released 2006 Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches. The Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal church, grew 1.81 percent to just under 2.8 million members. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints increased 1.74 percent to nearly 6 million people. And the Catholic Church, by the far the largest denomination in the United States, grew .83 percent to 67.8 million...