In Greece, creditors and the government continued their work on a debt deal that would give a haircut to debt holders and set a new interest rate going forward, reducing Greece’s debt level. After hedge funds appeared to be playing a game of chicken by holding out on a deal, cooler heads may have prevailed.

The American people are now very favorably inclined towards the idea of an independent presidential candidate challenging both Barack Obama and the eventual Republican nominee next year, according to a new Washington Post/ABC News poll

Foreclosures continue to increase, with 610,337 filings last quarter (that averages out to almost 2.5 million annually), and new default notices also increased 14%. And the foreclosure backlog continued to pile up, because banks cannot prove ownership of many of the homes. So some banks are finding it cheaper to just demolish foreclosed homes than pay to keep them up.

Fifty years ago today, East German soldiers began overseeing the construction of the Berlin Wall. That wall came down in 1989, but as Der Spiegel reminds us, other walls remain elsewhere in the world.

Even more insidious, though, are the invisible walls we build with money and defend with lawyers, all in an attempt to defend the status quo and nail things down as they are right now.

Sorry, but life is like a river, and you can’t nail it down. Count me among those who yearn for life without such walls.

This past week, Pope Benedict XVI named Denver Archbishop Charles J. Chaput to succeed Cardinal Justin Rigali as head of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. While this is an in-house decision of the Roman Catholic church, it will have major implications far beyond Philly, and reaches deeply into the broader political discussions in the US and beyond. Chaput is a leading conservative voice on church and state, and a strong defender of the church in general, and he’s stepping into the biggest church vs. state battle going on right now outside of Ireland.

Naming Chaput to head up the Philadelphia Archdiocese put one of Benedict’s most articulate and powerful voices front and center in those battles, and also changes the secular political calculus for 2012 in Pennsylvania and beyond.

Other countries get results from voting. We don’t. Here are two things you can do.

Treasure Islands tells us that tax havens are much larger and much more destructive than most might realize, yet at the same time enjoy much more unofficial and formal support from governments in advanced economies than many of us want to believe.

On Monday evening, Irish television station RTE One revealed the existence of a 1997 Vatican letter to the Bishops of Ireland, forcing them to back down from mandating that bishops report abusive priests to the secular authorities. The letter came with a threat attached, that if the bishops took action against a priest and the priest appealed to Rome, Rome would back the priest and the bishop would end up with a black eye.

The saddest part of the whole thing? This threat worked.

Today’s New York Times aptly depicts the current mass economic insanity gripping the Western World. The articles are part of the same story of governments on their knees from bailing out banks while pretending that punishing citizens via austerity will keep their economies from collapsing.

The Portuguese government isn’t as deeply committed to keeping the banking system afloat as the Irish government, but the banks are experiencing significant liquidity problems as a result of the contracting economy and the increasing pressure from international bond markets. So once again we have the government of an EU member state willing to adopt draconian austerity measures on a more or less voluntary basis and it isn’t making the problems go away.