Dic
27
BEIJING China kicked off its National Day celebrations Monday by highlighting its hosting of the Beijing Olympics and the country’s first spacewalk, two hard-won successes in a tumultuous year marked by natural disasters, ethnic unrest and another food safety scandal.
The spacewalk on Saturday boosted a wave of Chinese pride and patriotism stemming from the Olympics, which is still a big news story in the domestic media one month after it ended. China’s Olympic heroes were honored in a three-hour ceremony at the Great Hall of the People that was broadcast live on national television.
State broadcaster CCTV showed the three returning astronauts, with flower garlands around their necks, waving and smiling as they were treated to a homecoming parade in Beijing. Their mission, including China’s first spacewalk, put the country closer to building a space station and landing a man on the moon.
Holding up Chinese flags and balloons, hundreds of people, many of them uniformed soldiers, cheered and applauded as the astronauts went by, with some shouting out, “Learn from the astronauts and salute the astronauts.”
One banner read: “Warmly celebrate the great success of the task of the Shenzhou manned space flight.”
Meanwhile, Vice President Xi Jinping, who oversaw preparations for the Beijing Summer Games, praised what he said was China’s realization of a 100-year dream to host the event and said it would keep China on its reform path.
“The successful holding of the Beijing Olympics and Paralympics has carried forward the Olympic spirit, improved the understanding and friendship between Chinese people and all people of the world,” Xi said. “It has … shown the world the great achievements of reform and opening and the building of socialist modernization.”
But Premier Wen Jiabao touched briefly on some of the country’s troubles so far this year during an address at a dinner banquet that included many foreign dignitaries.
“We prevailed over the disasters caused by the heavy snow and sleet storms and the devastating Wenchuan earthquake,” he said, referring to a freak storm just before February’s Lunar New Year that left scores dead and hundreds of thousands stranded during the country’s busiest travel period.
A magnitude 7.9 earthquake in May left nearly 90,000 people dead or missing.
“We still face many difficulties and problems in our endeavor to advance socialist modernization but we have full confidence to overcome them,” he said.
The 59th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China is Wednesday. This year also marks 30 years since China started the economic reforms that turned the country into the world’s factory floor and transformed all of its major cities.
Nov
4
More than 12,000 people gathered at the temple at dawn to celebrate a Hindu festival in the historic city of Jodhpur when the stampede occurred early Tuesday morning.
The temple floors were slick with coconut milk as thousands of devotees broke coconuts as religious offerings, causing pilgrims to slip and fall as they scrambled to escape, said Ramesh Vyas, a pilgrim who was standing in line.
Vyas said it was the false rumors of a bomb that sparked the chaos, and that tensions were high because India has been hit by a spate of recent bomb attacks. The latest was on Monday night in the western city of Malegaon, killing six people and wounding 45.
At least 168 people were killed in the stampede, said Naresh Pal Gangwar, the district collector.
Television footage from Jodhpur showed dozens of bodies lying on the sidewalk, while nearby frantic people tried to revive unconscious devotees, slapping their faces and pressing on their chests.
Others dragged people by their arms and legs, running down a ramp that leads to the temple inside the massive 15th century Mehrangarh fort that overlooks the town.
One child sat on the ground next to the body of a woman, rubbing her forehead and crying “mother, mother.”
The injured have been admitted to half a dozen hospitals in Jodhpur.
Tuesday marked the first day of Navratra, a nine-day Hindu festival to honor the Mother Goddess.
Jodhpur is some 180 miles (290 kilometers) southwest of the Rajasthan state capital of Jaipur.
The Mehrangarh fort is one of the town’s biggest tourist attractions with its huge walls, ornate interiors and views overlooking Jodhpur’s “blue city.”
Deadly stampedes are a relatively common occurrence at temples in India, where large crowds — sometimes hundreds of thousands of people — congregate in small areas lacking facilities to control big gatherings.
In August, 145 people were killed when rumors of an avalanche sparked a stampede at a hilltop temple in northern India.
Nov
3
Occupational Outlook Handbook:
The Occupational Outlook Handbook describes what workers do on the job, working conditions, the training and education needed, earnings, and expected job prospects in a wide range of occupations.A - Z Search Index:
Use the Occupational Outlook Handbook Search Index to find a specific occupation or click on a letter to browse a list of occupations.Occupational Clusters:
There are 13 major occupational clusters in the Handbook including management, business and finance, sales, service, production, farming, Armed Services, office and administrative support and construction.Job Descriptions:
Within each Occupational Cluster there is specific information on occupations including significant points, job descriptions, wage and earnings information, job outlook, the nature of the work and job qualifications, advancement and outlook.Career Guide to Industries:
The Career Guide to Industries provides information on available careers by industry, including the nature of the industry, working conditions, employment, occupations in the industry, training and advancement, earnings and benefits, and employment outlook.
Nov
3
The real solution to the financial crisis: recession (The Christian Science Monitor)
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The premise is that doing nothing will hasten recession. And recession is unacceptable.
But that kind of thinking is a big reason we're now on the verge of a financial meltdown. By taking a zero-tolerance policy toward recession, Washington has dangerously juiced the economy with monetary steroids for more than a decade.
The painful truth is that recession may be precisely what's needed to restore economic health. Yet the bailout attempts to avoid this crucial reckoning - which may make things worse.
It may seem odd that avoiding slowdowns could have side effects. Recessions, after all, cause real damage: job losses, higher levels of business failures, and falling tax receipts.
However, just as seemingly healthy measures, such as taking vitamins, can cause damage if done to excess, so did the Greenspan-era Federal Reserve take recession avoidance too far. It helped feed the excessive borrowing that is the root of our current crisis.
In the wake of the dot-com crash, the Fed went way beyond past fixes and lowered the funds rate to 1.25 percent for nearly eight months, then an extraordinary 1 percent for a full year.
At such low levels, consumers who save lose; they are better off spending or borrowing. And they did both. Private debt as a ratio to Gross Domestic Product skyrocketed some 50 percent in five years. Similarly, the savings rate plummeted to zero.
But the Fed was overly permissive even earlier. By 2001, the "Greenspan put," the idea that the Fed would be quick to cut rates to prevent a stock market decline, was part of the vernacular and investor conditioning.
This was a radical departure, since the Fed had never seen the stock market as part of its job description.
In the 1990s, the central bank recognized the benign effect of cheap imports on inflation but failed to adjust interest rates accordingly, leaving them too low. In fact, the increase in the private debt to GDP ratio steepened starting in 1996, and the savings rate has been falling since 1992. Greenspan was famously obsessed with data, so his ignorance of the implications of these trends is incomprehensible. It is tantamount to keeping an athlete on steroids even when he is showing clear signs of distress.
To be sure, this easy money policy isn't the only culprit in today's crisis. Lax regulation failed to keep tabs on Wall Street's excessive risk-taking and byzantine financial products.
But even as they work fervently to beef up regulations, policymakers today are repeating the Greenspan error of trying to avoid recession no matter what. The ugly fact is that there is no painless way out of our financial mess.
John McCain and Barack Obama weren't willing to admit this in Friday night's debate. Mervyn King, the head of the Bank of England, has been more forthright, telling the British that their standard of living will fall. No US policymaker has been so candid. And Washington appears determined to minimize the immediate damage of Wall Street settling its debt, no matter the long-term cost.
The bailout bill is a classic example of expediency over effectiveness. It will purchase dud assets at above-market prices. It does serve to recapitalize banks, but it rewards the worst offenders and does nothing to restore trust. Even though Japan is the poster child of how not to manage a banking system crisis, this is a page straight out of its playbook.
By contrast, the most successful approach is to let asset prices fall to discover the extent of the damage, take over failed banks, recapitalize them, and later sell them back to investors. That's according to a new International Monetary Fund report that examined 124 banking crises in the past 27 years.
This approach is harder on the economy in the short term, usually leading to a two- to-three-year deep recession, but with a strong growth rebound after that. Too bad the US doesn't do recessions; the idea of a painful purge is deemed to be beyond the pale. And getting religion later doesn't work: the Japanese later recanted, forced banks to write down bad loans, and injected public funds, but today, 18 years after the country's asset bubble started popping, they remain stuck in a deflationary trap.
American attachment to instant gratification is strong. So is the pressure to pass the bailout. But left unchecked by self-restraint and honest reckoning, both forces may lead America to repeat, on a grander scale, the same sort of error that got us in this financial mess in the first place.
• Yves Smith has worked in the financial services industry since 1980. She blogs at nakedcapitalism.com.
Nov
3
The Dow Jones industrial average lost 777 points Monday, its biggest single-day fall ever, easily beating the 684 points it lost on the first day of trading after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
As uncertainty gripped investors, the credit markets, which provide the day-to-day lending that powers business in the United States, froze up even further.
At the New York Stock Exchange, traders watched with faces tense and mouths agape as TV screens showed the House vote rejecting the Bush administration’s $700 billion plan to buy up bad debt and shore up the financial industry.
Activity on the trading floor became frenetic as the “sell” orders blew in. The selling was so intense that just 162 stocks on the Big Board rose, while 3,073 dropped.
The Dow Jones Wilshire 5000 Composite Index recorded a paper loss of $1 trillion across the market for the day, a first.
The Dow industrials, which were down 210 points at 1:30 p.m. EDT, nose-dived as traders on Wall Street and investors across the country saw “no” votes piling up on live TV feeds of the House vote.
By 1:42 p.m., the decline was 292 points. Then the bottom fell out. Within five minutes, the index was down about 700 points as it became clear the bill was doomed.
“How could this have happened? Is there such a disconnect on Capitol Hill? This becomes a problem because Wall Street is very uncomfortable with uncertainty,” said Gordon Charlop, managing director with Rosenblatt Securities.
“The bailout not going through sends a signal that Congress isn’t willing to do their part,” he added.
While investors didn’t believe that the plan was a cure-all and it could take months for its effects to be felt, most market watchers believed it was at least a start toward setting the economy right and unlocking credit.
“Clearly something needs to be done, and the market dropping 400 points in 10 minutes is telling you that,” said Chris Johnson, president of Johnson Research Group. “This isn’t a market for the timid.”
Before trading even began came word that Wachovia Corp., one of the biggest banks to struggle from rising mortgage losses, was being rescued in a buyout by Citigroup Inc.
That followed the recent forced sale of Merrill Lynch & Co. and the failure of three other huge banking companies — Bear Stearns Cos., Washington Mutual Inc. and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., all of them felled by bad mortgage investments.
And it raised the question: Which banks are next, and how many? The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. lists more than 110 banks in trouble in the second quarter, and the number has probably grown since.
Wall Street is contending with all of it against the backdrop of a credit market — where bonds and loans are bought and sold — that is barely functioning because of fears that anyone lending money will never be paid back.
More evidence could be found Monday in the Treasury’s three-month bill, where investors were stashing money, willing to accept the tiniest of returns simply to be sure that their principal would survive. The yield on the three-month bill was 0.15 percent, down from 0.87 percent and approaching zero, a level reached last week when fear was also running high.
Analysts said the government needs to find a way to help restore confidence in the markets.
“It’s probably fair to say that we are not going to see any significant stability in the credit markets or the stock market until we see some sort of rescue package passed,” said Fred Dickson, director of retail research for D.A. Davidson & Co.
The bailout bill failed 228-205 in the House, and Democratic leaders said the House would reconvene Thursday in hopes of a quick vote on a revised bill.
“We need to put something back together that works,” Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said. “We need it as soon as possible.”
The Dow fell 777.68 points, just shy of 7 percent, to 10,365.45, its lowest close in nearly three years. The decline also surpasses the record for the biggest decline during a trading day — 721.56 at one point on Sept. 17, 2001, when the market reopened after 9/11.
In percentage terms, it was only the 17th-biggest decline for the Dow, far less severe than the 20-plus-percent drops seen on Black Monday in 1987 and before the Great Depression.
Broader stock indicators also plummeted. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index declined 106.85, or nearly 9 percent, to 1,106.42. It was the S&P’s largest-ever point drop and its biggest percentage loss since the week after the October 1987 crash.
The Nasdaq composite index fell 199.61, more than 9 percent, to 1,983.73, its third-worst percentage decline. The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies fell 47.07, or 6.7 percent, to 657.72.
A huge drop in oil prices was another sign of the economic chaos that investors fear. Light, sweet crude fell $10.52 to settle at $96.36 on the New York Mercantile Exchange as investors feared energy demand would continue to slide amid further economic weakness. And gold, where investors flock when they need a relatively secure investment, rose $23.20 to $911.70 on the Nymex.
Marc Pado, U.S. market strategist at Cantor Fitzgerald, said investors are worried about the spread of troubles beyond banks in the U.S. to Europe and other markets.
“Things are dying and breaking apart,” he said.
The federal Office of Thrift Supervision, one of the government’s banking regulators, indicated that the market was overreacting to the House vote and that its fears about the financial system are misplaced.
“There is an irrational financial panic taking place today, and we support and applaud the continuing efforts of Secretary Paulson and congressional leadership to restore liquidity and public confidence,” John Reich, Director of the federal Office of Thrift Supervision, said in a statement.
The plan would have placed caps on pay packages of top executives that accepted help from the government, and included assurances the government would ultimately be reimbursed by the companies for any losses.
The Treasury would have been permitted to spend $250 billion to buy banks’ risky assets, giving them a much-needed cash infusion. There also would be another $100 billion for use at the president’s discretion and a final $350 billion if Congress signs off.
But Wall Street found further reason for worry overseas. Three European governments agreed to a $16.4 billion bailout for Fortis NV, Belgium’s largest retail bank, and the British government said it was nationalizing mortgage lender Bradford & Bingley, which has a $91 billion mortgage and loan portfolio. It was the latest sign that the credit crisis has spread beyond the U.S. New York and Christopher S. Rugaber in Washington contributed to this report. New York Stock Exchange:
Nasdaq Stock Market:
Nov
1
Grandparents boost kids’ development: Aussie study (Reuters)
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The four-year government-funded study, released on Tuesday, measured children's physical, learning and cognitive development, in addition to social and emotional functioning.
It showed that children aged from 3 to 19 months had higher learning scores if they were cared for by family and friends — including grandparents — as well as their parents.
"This new study demonstrates just what a critical role grandparents play in the development of children," Federal Families, Housing and Community Services Minister Jenny Macklin was quoted by Australian media as saying.
"We know from this study how important it is to a child's development to … spend as much time as possible every day reading and spending time playing with children," she said.
The "Growing up in Australia" report is the first comprehensive national study of Australian children over time, Macklin said. More than 10,000 families with children took part in the study, which started in 2004.
(Writing by Miral Fahmy, editing by Alex Richardson)
Oct
29
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Delight is 16 months old and came home with our mare who had been on loan for 3 months. She now runs of 60 acres with 20 horses and a donkey.
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Oct
29
Policy Receipt
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More about work dress codes: Work Dress Codes and Image Collection
This is a policy acknowledgement sample that you can use when employees need to acknowledge their receipt and understanding of a policy.
Policy Receipt Acknowledgement for the Dress Code
In effect: (Date) until further notice
I have read and been informed about the content, requirements, and expectations of the dress code policy for employees at Your Company. I have received a copy of the policy and agree to abide by the policy guidelines as a condition of my employment and my continuing employment at Your Company.
I understand that if I have questions, at any time, regarding the dress code policy, I will consult with my immediate supervisor or my Human Resources staff members.
Please read the dress code policy carefully to ensure that you understand the policy before signing this document.
Employee Signature: _______________________________________
Employee Printed Name: ____________________________________
Date: _________________________
Disclaimer:
This sample policy is provided for guidance only. The provided information - policies, procedures, samples, examples, and guidelines - while authoritative, is not guaranteed for accuracy and legality. While I make every effort to provide and link accurate, legal, and complete information, I cannot guarantee it is correct. Please seek legal assistance, or assistance from State, Federal, or International governmental resources, to make certain your legal interpretation and decisions are correct.
Additional Resources About Dress Codes Sample Letter to Introduce a Dress Code Dress for Work Success: A Business Casual Dress Code Casual Dress Code Dress Code for Customer Interaction and Trade Shows.
Oct
29
Tuesday September 30, 2008 This interview is part of a continuing series of pet health insurance company interviews.
I am using the same ten questions for each of the veterinary health insurers so that viewers can learn about each company and compare what plans are available.
In this interview, Chris Ashton, co-founder & president for Petplan insurance, answers ten questions about pet care plans available through Petplan.
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Oct
29
A personal cat carrier is an excellent means of including your cat in short trips, taking him for walks, or just bonding with him. Personal carriers can be worn much like baby slings or backpacks, and some even convert like strollers for cats, or car seats. Cat lovers who like to include their cats in all aspects of their lives will love the concept of personal cat carriers. I’ve been known to work on my computer with a cat resting on my chest in a personal carrier - a great bonding experience.
1. PetPocketThe PetPocket is a great personal carrier for cats. Comfortable, padded, adjustable shoulder straps allow your cat to rest on your chest, secured with a safety clip to attach to a collar or harness. A drawstring opening allows your cat to safely see the world around as you go for a walk or chat with friends in an outdoors coffee shop. An outside pocket provides room for treats, toys, or a leash. For safety reasons, the PetPocket should not be worn while travelling. 2. Pet Wheel-AwayThe Pet Wheel-Away is a remarkably adaptable personal pet carrier, which converts to a backpack, a car seat, or even a bed at the end of your travels. A telescopic handle makes for easy wheeling, and padded straps emerge from hiding for a backpack conversion. By retracting the handle and storing the straps in a convenient pocket, the Pet Wheel-Away can be converted to a (back seat) carseat by locking the seatbelt through the straps on the rear. Truly an all-purpose personal carrier. 3. Pet Pouch CarrierThis carrier looks very much like front carriers for human babies, with a diaper-like sling to support the weight of the cat (up to 18 lbs. for the large size, according to the merchant), and straps to go around the human’s shoulders. It comes in three sizes, and in red, black, or blue nylon, or blue denim. Personalization is optional.
