Mar
18
Articles.sniperslive:Being obese can take years off your life
Filed Under BBC News, Health, News, Top Stories | 59 Comments
LONDON – Being obese can take years off your life and in some cases may be as dangerous as smoking, a new study says. British researchers at the University of Oxford analyzed 57 studies mostly in Europe and North America, following nearly one million people for an average of 10 to 15 years. During that time, about 100,000 of those people died.
The studies used Body Mass Index (BMI), a measurement that divides a person’s weight in kilograms by their height squared in meters to determine obesity. Researchers found that death rates were lowest in people who had a BMI of 23 to 24, on the high side of the normal range.
Health officials generally define overweight people as those with a BMI from 25 to 29, and obese people as those with a BMI above 30.
The study was published online Wednesday in the medical journal, Lancet. It was paid for by Britain’s Medical Research Council, the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK and others.
“If you are heading towards obesity, it may be a good idea to lose weight,” said Sir Richard Peto, the study’s main statistician and a professor at Oxford University.
Peto and colleagues found that people who were moderately fat, with a BMI from 30 to 35, lost about three years of life. People who were morbidly fat – those with a BMI above 40 – lost about 10 years off their expected lifespan, similar to the effect of lifelong smoking.
Moderately obese people were 50 percent more likely to die prematurely than normal-weight people, said Gary Whitlock, the Oxford University epidemiologist who led the study.
He said that obese people were also two thirds more likely to die of a heart attack or stroke, and up to four times more likely to die of diabetes, kidney or liver problems. They were one sixth more likely to die of cancer.
“This really emphasizes the importance of weight gain,” said Dr. Arne Astrup, a professor of nutrition at the University of Copenhagen who was not linked to the Lancet study. “Even a small increase in your BMI is enough to increase your risks for cardiovascular disease and cancer.”
Previous studies have found that death rates increase both above and below a normal BMI score, and that people who are moderately overweight live longer than underweight or normal-weight people.
Other experts said that because the papers used in the study mostly started between 1975 and 1985, their conclusions were not as relevant today.
Astrup worried that rising obesity rates may reverse the steep drops in heart disease seen in the West.
“Obesity is the new dark horse for public health officials,” he said. “People need to be aware of the risks they’re taking when they gain weight.”
Mar
15
Seven Ways to Start Your Freelance Copywriting Career Off Right
Filed Under Advertising | Leave a Comment
You can suffer a profitable and successful run as a freelance copywriter but you experience you suffer to get began on the affirmative track first.
1. Start investing in the Basics.
Ready to hang your shingle and requirement yourself a freelancer? You’ll look for a few fundamentals to get your boom off the ground.
Business cards, letterhead, equipment and a good deal your own ad campaign can be rudiments you would not figure close to at first. They’re important to turning out set for your new run path, though.
2. Make a Plan of Action
It’s not recently the big companies which wish a program of action. As a freelancer, you are the industry and you would like a initiative too. Not merely performs currently put up you guidelines you desire to identify your goals, it furthermore sells you key info you can use to sector yourself to impending clients.
3. Set Your Rates
Deciding how you are set to credit is one of the multiple difficult decisions you will hold to craft as a freelance copywriter. It’s fundamental too you set your expenses proper on the start.
Your first and foremost decision is whether to credit by the hour, by the anticipate or to affix both number types. This survey supplies you an notion how a good amount of freelancers credit such a clients.
Your numbers will be able to additionally affects how you term surrounded by clientele and get paid. Spend a lot of moment developing your market value and look at how you can make a home in on as a fee in the past due to the fact that clientele do not desire to Hello How Are you? investing in freelancers who are slowly influencing the worth and sum types.
4. Create Writing Samples
You can not demonstrate off your furnishing talent if you undergo no samples. If you do not experience any furnishing samples to your credit, there is an easy solution.
give you the odds to put up producing samples still if you do not own any copywriting projects below your belt. Spec Ads are not just recently for copywriters among limited or no experience. They are an superior way for you to verify possibility clientele how you should produce for the selected industry.
5. Prepare Your Portfolio
Get your portfolio anticipated now before the patrons start on calling. The survive fact you seek to undergo to bargain through at the endure time is preparing your portfolio the night before a customer meeting.
Having your portfolio forecasted to go at any while as well permits you the option to established on how the patron is coming across as for in a freelancer. This lets you switch out your projects founded on the client’s needs, shooting your ability to do our utmost surrounded by any sort of patron no question how the product/service.
6. Develop a Freelance Contract
When such a original patron calls, you wish to hold your contract supposed to be faxed or presented in person. As excited as you may be to get the present original client, you do not fancy to create struggling on any predict until you own a signed contract in your hand.
Creating a freelance contract is key to any freelancers success. It’s your above all sequence of defense if you of all time see yourself amongst a customer who does not need to pay.
7. Find Clients
Remember all persons ground rules you got up in evolution one? Now it is long time to put them to fine use.
Whether you are coming establishments for freelance work, making an effort to get pithy organizations to use your services or both, you can take many distinct approaches to forward your clients. Take folks market cards and your portfolio to tiny boom conventions to neighborhoods all out there you. Send out your resources advertising yourself to advertising agencies, acutely tinier systems who ask for freelancers while the expenditure of a permanent, full-time copywriter is too a good deal for the agency to bear.
Just be persistent in your search engine for patrons and eventually your freelance copywriting run will be able to be so successful, you will in fact be impacting new sector away!
Mar
11
HBO, Mormons square off over airing of sacred rite
Filed Under Entertainment, News | Leave a Comment
SALT LAKE CITY – HBO on Tuesday defended its plans to depict a sacred Mormon temple ceremony in an upcoming episode of “Big Love.”
The drama about a Utah polygamous family will show an endowment ceremony Sunday.
HBO said it did not intend to be disrespectful of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and apologized.
“Obviously, it was not our intention to do anything disrespectful to the church, but to those who may be offended, we offer our sincere apology,” the premium cable channel said in a statement issued Tuesday.
But the ceremony is an important part of the “Big Love” story line, HBO said.
In the scene, actress Jeanne Tripplehorn’s character, Barb, goes through the endowment ceremony as she faces losing her membership in the Mormon church.
On Monday, Mormon church leaders criticized HBO for its decision to include the ceremony and said airing the material shows the insensitivity of the network’s writers, producers and executives.
“Certainly church members are offended when their most sacred practices are misrepresented or presented without context or understanding,” the church statement said.
Only church members in good standing can enter temples to perform or witness sacred ceremonies. The ceremonies are centered on religious teachings and re-enactments of Bible stories to help Mormons prepare an eternal place for themselves – and others by proxy – in heaven.
Members take a vow not to discuss the rituals outside temple walls, although details of the ceremonies are widely available on the Internet.
The dramatization of the ceremony was vetted for accuracy by an adviser familiar with temple ceremonies who was on set during filming, said series creators and executives producers Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer.
“In approaching the dramatization of the endowment ceremony, we knew we had a responsibility to be completely accurate and to show the ceremony in the proper context and with respect,” Olsen and Scheffer said in a separate statement issued through HBO. “We therefore took great pains to depict the ceremony with the dignity and reverence it is due.”
The church declined an interview request by The Associated Press on Tuesday.
News of the episode has sparked an online campaign by individual Latter-day Saints, who are calling for a boycott of “Big Love” and cancellation of subscriptions to HBO, AOL and other Time Warner Inc.-owned entities.
The church itself has not called for a boycott and said in its statement that doing so would just fuel controversy and interest in the program.
Church leaders also said members of the rapidly growing faith should not feel defensive about HBO’s characterization of Mormons.
“There is no evidence that extreme misrepresentations in the media that appeal only to a narrow audience have any long term negative effect on the church,” they said in the statement.
“Big Love” is in its third season on HBO and a fourth is in the works. The program tells the story of Bill Hendrickson, a fundamentalist (played by Bill Paxton) who runs a chain of hardware stores and lives with three wives (Tripplehorn, Chloe Sevigny and Ginnifer Goodwin) in a Salt Lake City suburb.
Like Utah’s real-life fundamentalists, the Hendricksons’ beliefs are tied to the early teachings of Mormon church founder Joseph Smith, who said polygamy was an essential doctrine for exaltation in the afterlife. The church ultimately abandoned the practice in 1890 as a condition of Utah’s statehood.
When “Big Love” first aired, negotiations between the church and HBO resulted in a one-time disclaimer included in the show’s credits that distinguished the modern church’s position on polygamy from the beliefs of the fictional characters in the series.
This season, however, the show’s polygamy-focused stories have included more mainstream Mormon references. The program references events from Mormon history and the Hendricksons take a family vacation to upstate New York for the Hill Cumorah Pageant, a reenactment of stories from the Book of Mormon.
“Despite earlier assurances from HBO, it once again blurs the distinction between The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the show’s fictional non-Mormon characters and their practices,” the church statement said.
HBO contends that throughout its three-year run writers and producers of “Big Love” have continued to make a clear “distinction between the LDS church and those extreme fringe groups who practice polygamy.”
Being featured in a popular HBO series is in many ways a plus for the 178-year-old church, said Daniel Stout, a professor of journalism and media studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
“It says the Mormon church has come of age, it’s a major American religion,” said Stout, who studies and writes about the intersection of religion and popular culture.
But the attention may also raise fears among church leaders that Mormons will become a target for ridicule or persecution because the details of the sacred temple ceremony will seem strange to non-Mormons. However, studies have shown that predictions about the effects of media depictions aren’t always accurate, Stout said.
“There are many themes and issues dealt with by `Big Love,’” he said. “It’s a story of family, of relationships and the dynamics of polygamy. It’s entertainment. I’m not sure people will be watching it like a documentary.”
Jan
9
FRESNO, Calif. – Is it trespassing when bees do what bees do in California’s tangerine groves?
That is the question being weighed by state agriculture officials caught between beekeepers who prize orange blossom honey and citrus growers who blame the bees for causing otherwise seedless mandarin oranges to develop pips.
“Both sides are unwilling to give any ground, and both have valid points,” said Jerry Prieto, the former Fresno County agricultural commissioner who has spent six months mediating the dispute.
The fight comes amid a worldwide consumer taste shift toward seedless grapes, watermelons and tangerines – at the same time the nation’s struggling bee colonies look for winter food.
The California Department of Food and Agriculture is scheduled to issue draft regulations this month that will require beekeepers to register their locations with county agricultural commissioners by March 1 so growers can monitor hives within two miles of their groves. If bees are too close, growers can ask beekeepers to move and hope they comply.
“But they won’t have to move,” said Rayne Pegg, deputy secretary of legislation and policy for the CDFA.
Absent a method of resolving disputes, Prieto predicted: “This is going to end up in court.”
Mega-grower Paramount Citrus has already sent letters to beekeepers near the company’s Kern County clementine groves threatening legal action and promising to seek “compensation for any and all damages caused to its crops, as well as punitive damages” if seeds develop. Company officials did not return phone calls seeking comment.
The new regulations would affect Kern, Tulare, Fresno and Madera counties in the southern San Joaquin Valley, where many orange growers converted to easy-to-peel tangerines. The fruit’s California acreage was expanded from 24,000 in 2005 to 31,392 in 2008 to compete with imports from Spain and the Middle East.
Tangerines and other normally seedless mandarins do not need bees to move pollen from the male to female parts of the flower in the process known as pollination. But if bees cross-pollinate the crop with the pollen of other fruit, mandarins develop undesireable seeds.
Almond trees on the west side of the valley, on the other hand, need lots of bees to pollinate. For the February pollination season, almond growers hire beekeepers from around the country to bring tens of thousands of hives to California, home to 70 percent of the world’s supply.
As almond blossoms drop in late March, citrus growers say, beekeepers relocate hives to make orange blossom honey before heading to the Midwest for spring clover season.
Some growers, who by law must ban spraying for citrus mites and other pests when bees are present, say the bees are an increasing burden.
“We’ve coexisted with them, but we don’t need them,” said Joel Nelson, executive director of California Citrus Mutual, a trade association. “Now we’re trying to adapt to changing consumer demands, and we’re hamstrung.”
Beekeepers say that, with development in the state’s agricultural regions, there already are a limited number of places to take the bees for feeding.
“Our winter losses are increasing (because of colony collapse), and part of the problem is finding places to put bees where they have access to natural food, and citrus is part of that,” said Gene Brandi, a Los Banos beekeeper and legislative liaison for the California State Beekeepers Association.
Chris Lange, a grower from Woodlake in Tulare County, recently converted 32 of his 1,600 acres of citrus groves on Beresford Ranches to the more profitable mandarin oranges, which he will start harvesting at the end of January.
“We already have an idea of where we’ll find the seeds,” said Lange, lamenting that most of his crop could wind up as juice. “You can’t grow the crop for the juice market, you have to grow for the premium crop or you won’t recover your costs.”
During discussions seeking a compromise, beekeepers suggested that mandarin growers net their crops to keep out bees. Mandarin growers asked beekeepers to reduce hive density so bees do not have to fly far to compete for food.
Both sides said no.
“The ag industry is being forced to weigh which side should have a stronger case,” said Pegg, of the agriculture department, “and that’s a difficult thing for us to decide. We’re just not going to make anyone happy.”
Sep
18
Parents: When to back off, when to step in
Filed Under CNN News, Health, News | Leave a Comment
ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) — Do you speed over to your child’s school, or even college, whenever something goes wrong?
Parents should try to teach their children how to handle situations themselves, experts say.
Many parents today insert themselves into even the most minute activities in their children’s lives, a phenomenon that’s known as “helicopter parenting.”
But two child experts told CNN that parents should aim to empower their children to do things on their own.
“Parenting should be increasingly in the background as the child gets older,” said Vivian Friedman, child-adolescent psychologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “If you do for your child for too long, they never learn to do for themselves.”
Dr. Kenneth Ginsburg, M.D., associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and author of the book “A Parent’s Guide to Building Resilience in Children and Teens,” said it’s important to show children you believe they are capable of handling situations themselves, but always put safety first. Read more about helicopter parents »
The “helicopter parent” trend may have arisen because the focus of marriage has shifted from the spouse to the child, Friedman said. An increase in divorce and a greater prevalence of two working spouses also contribute to parents’ habits of spoiling their children.
“When [the kids] have little failures, they feel like our own failures,” Ginsburg said. “What we need to understand is that our job as parents is not to finish our kids or produce perfect kids. It’s to start our kids.” Watch more on when helicopter parents go too far »
Here’s what Friedman and Ginsburg recommended for various situations that may arise in your child’s life:
1. The elementary school is putting on “Peter Pan” tomorrow. While you prepare a presentation for an important business meeting, your daughter calls and tells you she forgot her Tinkerbell costume for the dress rehearsal. “I’m the only one who’s not dressed up,” she tells you.
Friedman and Ginsburg agreed that it’s OK to take care of it the first time she forgets the costume, but not if it becomes a habit.
“The first time: Find a housekeeper or neighbor to bring it over,” Friedman said. “But if she does this routinely, she needs to suffer consequences to learn from the experience.”
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“One time, two-time mistake — it’s wonderful to pick up the pieces,” Ginsburg said. “If, in fact, you always end up picking up pieces, you can’t expect a kid to learn the valuable lesson that they can do it themselves. Learn from failure — failure’s a great thing when you learn how to recover yourself.”
2. You’re at the playground reading a newspaper and suddenly your daughter runs up to you crying. “They won’t let me make sand castles with them,” she whines.
Friedman said this one depends on age. For a 3- or 4-year-old, it’s appropriate for the parent to go over to the group as a neutral adult and help the children learn that they need to include everybody.
But for a 7-year-old, it’s borderline. “You could say, ‘What seems to be the problem? Do you think there’s a way we could all play together?’ rather than ‘You can’t exclude my child,’ ” she said.
Ginsburg, on the other hand, said you can suggest to your child what to say, or recommend that she find someone else to play with, but you shouldn’t communicate that your child isn’t capable of handling the situation.
“Learning how to play nice with other people in the sandbox is a great metaphor for life,” he said.
3. Kids in the seventh-grade class just won’t leave your son alone, not even online. Besides shoving him against the lockers once in awhile, they’ve also set up a MySpace page making fun of his appearance and name.
Experts agree that you should step in here and notify the school. Friedman would also notify the parents of the children involved — “Most rational, reasonable parents would not support their child doing that,” she said.
Ginsburg emphasized that safety always comes first. “You don’t allow your daughter to put her hand in the oven to learn it’s hot,” he said. “You don’t allow a kid to be bullied when there should be systems in place to prevent bullying. “
4. Your son started college a month ago, and every time you call him he has a new story about his messy, party-loving roommate who distracts him from studying and interrupts his sleep. “I wouldn’t mind as much if it were my own vomit on the floor,” your son tells you. He says he’ll just stick it out for the rest of the year.
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Friedman and Ginsburg said they would not approach the college housing department and ask to have the young man moved, except in extreme or difficult circumstances — such as if the child is in a special needs program and can’t help himself, Friedman said.
“There’s nothing wrong with asking open-ended questions to help your son figure it out,” Ginsburg said. “It’s OK to say ‘Who can you talk to at the university to change your living situation?’ What’s not OK is to call the dean and say ‘Move my son.’ ” 5. Always a technical genius, your daughter majors in electrical engineering and will surely become a pioneer of great innovations. But this semester, the last of her junior year, she failed her 18th-century literature class, which she took to fulfill the subject-area distribution requirements. This is going to look pretty bad on graduate school applications.
While the daughter can speak to the professor on her own, Friedman and Ginsburg said they would not intervene in this situation.
Special circumstances would be if the grade was truly unfair and there was real foul play involved, or if the professor was drunk — but otherwise, Friedman said, “It’s her F, it’s not your F. I would do absolutely nothing.”
6. Your daughter has been in the real world for a year, but she says she’s not ready to keep herself afloat financially. For the third time this summer she asks for help paying the rent — “phone bill would be extra nice,” she adds. You also notice that she’s got a new pair of Manolo Blahnik pumps, and an iPhone is sticking out of her purse.
Friedman said she would not allow this to come up a third time — she would have made the daughter set up an automatic debit system early on so her child’s rent comes out of the account when her paycheck is deposited. “By the third month, I would let her sink, but I’m not a helicopter parent,” she said.
Ginsburg emphasized again the safety component: He would never want his daughter to become homeless. He would pay the first month’s rent with clear expectations: She needs to learn how to make a budget, she can’t spend money on other things until things like rent and food are taken care of, and she needs to know that this is a loan. “Seven months in a row: she needs to find a roommate,” he said.
Source
Aug
27
A Sudanese passenger jet hijacked by unknown assailants soon after it took off from Darfur has landed in Libya.
Filed Under News, World News | 58 Comments
There are more than 100 people on board the plane. The Libyan officials are holding dialogue with the unknown number of hijackers while all passengers remained on board. The hijackers, who are believed to be hard-line Darfur rebel group, have asked for jet fuel in order to fly on to Paris.
Jul
11
Citroen takes wraps off new C3 Picasso
Filed Under Cars News | 2 Comments
Supermini-MPV targets Renault Modus and family styling is supplied a different twist.
Citroen’s fresh masterpiece appears set to turn rivals blue amongst envy. Auto Express brought you exclusive spy shots of its new supermini MPV endure month. Now, official pictures of the C3 Picasso own arrived – and
it’s most any inch the artistic production its and cr suggests.
The French steady is willing to tempt mortgage holders away out of rivals this kind of as the Renault Modus and Ford’s forthcoming B-Max provided its new car, that is the third to wear the Picasso badge. It shares these types of family aspects as a wraparound windscreen, but as an all-new design, it serves to additionally be different based on what i read in the rest of the C3 line-up. A boldly styled front investing in tapered lights is complemented by a span of sporty features. There’s a deep front bumper, chunky alloys, front foglights and a dual grille. Flared wheelarches and SUV-style roof rails thorough the look.
At the back, high-mounted lights frame a split tailgate provided an independently opening glass section for versatile boot access. The curved A-pillars are similar to individuals on the perfect C4 Picasso.
According to Citroen, at 1.63 metres tall and 1.73 metres wide, the C3 would give out an astonishing total sum of cabin space. And the panoramic glass sunroof – that is the biggest in the superiority – shoots up the airy feel. In addition to the central levelheaded features, Citroen has as well focused on passenger comfort. So the seating position is high, and legroom is maximised – in the back, the bench adjusts by further as opposed to 150mm. It can in addition be folded flat to post 500 litres of storage.
The person is planning to be underpinned by a platform that as well forms the motive of the Peugeot 207 and next-generation C3.
Engine options comprise 1.4-litre VTi 95 and 1.6 VTi 120 petrols, as vastly as the existant 1.6-litre HDi 90 and HDi 110 diesels, as offered providing the 207. Specifications for UK cars experience yet to be finalised, but a production-ready version of the C3 Picasso would debut at the Paris Motor Show in October, alongside the rest
of the exemplary range. Prices are set to begin at about the £9,500 mark when it goes on sell approaching year.
Apr
13
Unusual earthquakes measured off Oregon
Filed Under Most Pepular, News | Leave a Comment
GRANTS PASS, Ore. – Scientists listening to underwater microphones have detected an unusual swarm of earthquakes off central Oregon, something that often happens before a volcanic eruption – except there are no volcanoes in the area.
Scientists don’t know exactly what the earthquakes mean, but they could be the result of molten rock rumbling away from the recognized earthquake faults off Oregon, said Robert Dziak, a geophysicist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Oregon State University.
There have been more than 600 quakes over the past 10 days in a basin 150 miles southwest of Newport. The biggest was magnitude 5.4, and two others were more than magnitude 5.0, OSU reported.
On the hydrophones, the quakes sound like low thunder and are unlike anything scientists have heard in 17 years of listening, Dziak said. Some of the quakes have also been detected by earthquake instruments on land.
The hydrophones are left over from a network the Navy used to listen for submarines during the Cold War. They routinely detect passing ships, earthquakes on the ocean bottom and whales calling to one another.
Scientists hope to send out an OSU research ship to take water samples, looking for evidence that sediment has been stirred up and chemicals that would indicate magma is moving up through the Juan de Fuca Plate, Dziak said.
The quakes have not followed the typical pattern of a major shock followed by a series of diminishing aftershocks, and few have been strong enough to be felt on shore.
The Earth’s crust is made up of plates that rest on molten rock, which are rubbing together. When the molten rock, or magma, erupts through the crust, it creates volcanoes.
That can happen in the middle of a plate. When the plates lurch against each other, they create earthquakes along the edges.
In this case, the Juan de Fuca Plate is a small piece of crust being crushed between the Pacific Plate and North America, Dziak said
Source:
Apr
12
Swarm of earthquakes detected off Oregon
Filed Under Most Pepular, News | Leave a Comment
GRANTS PASS, Ore. - Scientists listening to underwater microphones have detected an unusual swarm of earthquakes off central Oregon, something that often happens before a volcanic eruption – except there are no volcanoes in the area.
Scientists don’t know exactly what the earthquakes mean, but they could be the result of molten rock rumbling away from the recognized earthquake faults off Oregon, said Robert Dziak, a geophysicist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Oregon State University.
There have been more than 600 quakes over the past 10 days in a basin 150 miles southwest of Newport. The biggest was magnitude 5.4, and two others were more than magnitude 5.0, OSU reported.
On the hydrophones, the quakes sound like low thunder and are unlike anything scientists have heard in 17 years of listening, Dziak said. Some of the quakes have also been detected by earthquake instruments on land.
The hydrophones are left over from a network the Navy used to listen for submarines during the Cold War. They routinely detect passing ships, earthquakes on the ocean bottom and whales calling to one another.
Scientists hope to send out an OSU research ship to take water samples, looking for evidence that sediment has been stirred up and chemicals that would indicate magma is moving up through the Juan de Fuca Plate, Dziak said.
The quakes have not followed the typical pattern of a major shock followed by a series of diminishing aftershocks, and few have been strong enough to be felt on shore.
The Earth’s crust is made up of plates that rest on molten rock, which are rubbing together. When the molten rock, or magma, erupts through the crust, it creates volcanoes.
That can happen in the middle of a plate. When the plates lurch against each other, they create earthquakes along the edges.
In this case, the Juan de Fuca Plate is a small piece of crust being crushed between the Pacific Plate and North America, Dziak said.
Source:
Apr
6
Huge job losses set off recession alarms
Filed Under Most Pepular, News | Leave a Comment
WASHINGTON - It’s no longer a question of recession or not. Now it’s how deep and how long. Workers’ pink slips stacked ever higher in March as jittery employers slashed 80,000 jobs, the most in five years, and the national unemployment rate climbed to 5.1 percent. Job losses are nearing the staggering level of a quarter-million this year in just three months.
For the third month in a row total U.S. employment rolls shrank – often a telltale sign that the economy has jolted dangerously into reverse.
At the same time, the jobless rate rose three-tenths of a percentage point, a sharp increase usually associated with times of deep economic stress.
The grim picture described by the Labor Department on Friday provided stark evidence of just how much the jobs market has buckled under the weight of the housing, credit and financial crises. Businesses and jobseekers alike are feeling the pain.
“It is now very clear that the fat lady has sung for the economic expansion. The country has slipped into a recession,” said Stuart Hoffman, chief economist at PNC Financial Services Group. Indeed, there is widening agreement that the first recession since 2001 has arrived. Even Ben Bernanke, in a rare public utterance for a Federal Reserve chairman, used the “r” word, acknowledging for the first time this week that a recession was possible.
Job losses were widespread last month, hitting workers at factories, construction companies, retailers, banks, real-estate firms and even temporary-help agencies. Also mortgage brokers, hotels, computer design shops, accounting firms, architecture and engineering companies, legal services, airlines and other transportation as well as telecommunications companies.
Those cuts swamped employment gains elsewhere, including at hospitals and other heath-care sites, educational services, child day-care providers, bars and restaurants, insurance companies, museums, zoos and parks. And the government, which is almost always up.
In fact, private employers have shed jobs for four straight months, though December showed an overall gain for the economy because the government increase outweighed the private loss.
March’s losses were the most since the same month in 2003, when companies were still struggling to recover from the last recession. Adding to the angst: Revised figures showed losses were actually deeper than first reported for both January and February.
All told, the economy now has lost 232,000 jobs in the first three months of this year.
On Wall Street, investors took the weak employment figures in stride. The Dow Jones industrials lost just 16.61 points, while other indexes edged higher.
All the economy’s problems are forcing people and businesses to hunker down, crimping spending and hiring, a vicious cycle.
“Across the board, businesses have become very, very conservative,” said Joel Naroff, president of Naroff Economic Advisors. More downbeat about their own sales prospects because of cautious consumers, employers are cutting back. “It only makes sense for them to run leaner if we are going into a recession or already in one” as Naroff now believes.
The new employment figures were much weaker than economists were expecting. They were anticipating a drop of 50,000 payroll jobs.
Michael Gregory, senior economist at BMO Capital Markets Economics, said the employment report was “emitting recession signals.”
The national unemployment rate of 5.1 percent, relatively modest by historical standards, is nonetheless the highest since September 2005, following the devastating blows of the Gulf Coast hurricanes.
Some groups are feeling more of the strains from the economy’s current woes. The unemployment rate for Hispanics, for instance, jumped to 6.9 percent in March, the highest in over four years. The rate for blacks climbed to 9 percent, a two-month high.
With the public on edge, Congress, the White House and presidential contenders are scrambling to come up with their own relief plans to stem record-high home foreclosures and stabilize housing – even as they engage in a political blame game.
Democrats want more economic assistance, including extending unemployment benefits. The Bush administration has resisted, saying the government’s $168 billion stimulus package of tax rebates for people and tax breaks for businesses will be sufficient once it kicks in.
“We don’t like to see one job lost, let alone 80,000,” Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said in an interview with The Associated Press. “These are challenging times,” he said. Gutierrez was hopeful the economy would turn around in the second half of this year, given the relief efforts by the government and the Federal Reserve. “We’ll get through this.”
Democrats were skeptical of the administration’s efforts.
“Our economy is spiraling downward,” said presidential contender Hillary Rodham Clinton. “It is time for this administration to put ideology aside and get serious about stemming this crisis.”
Barack Obama said, “Instead of doing nothing for out-of-work Americans, we need a second stimulus that extends unemployment insurance and helps communities that have been hit hard by this recession.”
Republican John McCain said the unemployment news “underlines the need to focus on innovation, which grows the economy and creates an urgent need for effective worker retraining.”
Given the worsening employment situation, the Federal Reserve probably will lower a key interest rate, now at 2.25 percent, later this month.
The Fed has taken a number of extraordinary actions recently – slashing interest rates, providing financial backing to JP Morgan’s takeover of troubled Bear Stearns and opening an emergency lending program for big investment houses. All the actions were aimed at limiting damage to the national economy.
With the pace of hiring slowing, the number of unemployed people increased to 7.8 million in March.
Workers with jobs saw modest wage gains. Average hourly earnings for jobholders rose to $17.86 in March and are up 3.6 percent over the past 12 months. With lofty energy and food prices, workers may feel like their paychecks are shrinking. If the job market continues to falter, wage growth probably will slow, too, making consumers even less inclined to spend, which would further hurt the economy.
Many analysts believe the economy shrank in the first three months of this year and could still be ebbing now. The government will release its estimate of first-quarter economic growth later this month. Under one rough rule, if the economy contracts for six straight months it is considered in a recession. When a determination is made by a panel of experts about when a recession has started and ended – it is usually done well after the fact.
Bernanke and the Bush administration are hopeful the economy will improve in the second half of this year. Even so, Bernanke predicted this week that the unemployment rate would rise further. Some analysts say it could climb to 5.75 percent or higher this year.
Advises Hoffman: “If you’ve got a job, hang on to it the best you can.”
Source:Yahoo News