Array he said.Voter turnout in Irbid is expected to reach 71 per cent next month, followed by Zarqa (68 per cent) and Karak (61 per cent), according to the poll.However, despite renewed interest on the part of citizens, the survey revealed a general dissatisfaction about the performance of elected representatives and political parties.Almost two-thirds of respondents in the three municipalities said they intend to vote for independent candidates, citing reasons relating to family and tribal affiliations.Shteiwi said the findings do not bode well for the country’s transition to democracy.“Citizens vote for independent candidates because the current political parties are weak and their ideologies are too narrow. Out of these, 64 per cent in Zarqa said they would vote for the Islamic Action Front (IAF), as compared to 45 per cent in Karak and 43 per cent in Irbid.Most of the country’s 34 political parties, apart from IAF, which has 15 deputies in the Lower House, have less than 500 members.The survey also revealed the absence of a general participatory culture resulting from a lack of accountability on the part of elected representatives.More than 90 per cent of respondents in the three municipalities said they had never been contacted by a council member once elected.“The level of contact and/or interaction between constituents and their representatives is generally low, with contacts being one way, i.e.
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In 1970, in purchasing power parity terms, Japan’s GDP was 32.8 percent of U.S. GDP.[3] Thirty-four years later in 2004, it was 31.1 percent of U.S. GDP, leaving Japan relatively smaller compared to the U.S. than in 1970. In 2004, China’s GDP may have been 65.3 percent or, perhaps, even 74.1 percent of U.S. GDP.[5] And unlike Japan, China is not in a security alliance with the United States and has long maintained an independent nuclear capability. Between 1973 and 2004, China’s real GDP grew at an average annual rate of 6.86 percent, but between 1950 and 1973, Japan grew at a still faster average annual rate of 9.29 percent. By comparison, China has accounted for 20 percent of global GDP growth since 1973 and 24 percent since 1998. The scale of China’s accomplishment is truly impressive, but consider that the United States accounted for 25 percent of global GDP growth not just for a six- or seven-year period, but for a full forty-three years between 1870 and 1913.The U.S. experience is especially instructive. The explosive growth of China’s manufacturing labor force is widely seen as changing the terms of trade between unskilled labor and other factors of production in unprecedented ways worldwide as China continues to exploit its comparative advantage.[6] Between 1978 and 2002, China added 30 million manufacturing jobs.[7] This is double all of manufacturing employment in the United States today.[8] Consider, however, that during roughly comparable lengths of time in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Germany and the United States together added 9 million manufacturing jobs at a time when global GDP was 3 percent of what it is today and global population was no more than one-quarter its present size.[9] The United States in those years, like China today, was able to radically increase the size of its manufacturing labor force by drawing in workers who were effectively outside the international economic system. Real wages in the manufacturing industries of the UK and France during these same years grew by an average annual rate of less than 1 percent.[11] In marked contrast to what the U.S. and Germany experienced, as China has added 30 million workers to its manufacturing labor force between 1978 and 2002, real wages in manufacturing there have risen at an astonishing average annual rate of 12.4 percent.[12] At the same time, just as 100 years ago when the United States and Germany emerged as major players in the international economy, real wages in manufacturing have grown only modestly in at least some of China’s trading partners. Between 1978 and 2004, while real wages were growing rapidly in China, real hourly wages in manufacturing in the United States fell at an average annual rate of 0.2 percent.[13] During these same years, real manufacturing wages in Japan grew by a very modest average annual rate of 0.8 percent.[14] Unlike 100 years ago, the relationship between the emergence of China and the lid on the growth of demand elsewhere for manufacturing labor during the past quarter century may be more coincidental than causal. While China has accounted for 17.5 percent of the growth in world trade since 1998, over the entire period since 1973 it has accounted for no more than 8.5 percent of this growth. Notice that in the past ten years, when Chinese exports have come to loom largest in global markets, real manufacturing wages in the United States have reversed course and have been growing at an average annual rate of 0.5 percent, after having declined at an average annual rate of 0.7 percent during the preceding fifteen years.[15] The quarter-century lag in manufacturing real wages in the United States has many causes, but China cannot be one of the most important among them. These concerns rose exponentially between 1969 and 1971, when manufacturing employment fell by 1.4 million even as Japanese imports continued to grow.[18] Within a year, however, as unemployment in manufacturing began to dissipate, it became clear that the drop in employment had been driven largely by macroeconomic forces.[19] With imports accounting for no more than 4.5 percent of American consumption of manufactures, it could hardly be otherwise.[20] Within a few years, almost all the American industries most subject to Japanese competition employment had recovered to peak levels or greater even as Japanese imports continued to grow. By 1979, more than 1 million new manufacturing jobs had been added.[21] Since 1998, imports from China have grown at an annual average rate of 18.4 percent.[22] Unlike the somewhat faster growth of imports from Japan when it was a newly emerging economic power, this import growth has been associated with important structural changes in the U.S. labor market. In the ten industries (computer and electronic products, machinery, furniture, wood products, primary metals, fabricated metals, transportation equipment, textiles and apparel, printed matter, and paper and paper products) where imports from China have grown at an average annual rate of 20 percent or more between 1998 and 2004, no fewer than 2,565,000 jobs have been lost. Note, also, that unlike the late 1960s and early 1970s, in 2004 imports accounted for as much as 25 percent of domestic consumption.[23] In six of the industries where Chinese imports have surged in recent years, imports from there account for as much as 40 percent of the post-1998 increased share of imports in domestic consumption. The increases in the market share of Chinese imports in these three industries range from 1.1 percent to 2.7 percent between 1998 and 2004, yet these industries during this same period have experienced employment declines from 14.4 to 23.9 percent. Even in computer and electronic products, furniture, and textiles and apparel, increases in the share of Chinese imports in domestic consumption (12.9, 8.4, and 16.2 percent, respectively) cannot explain more than 35 to 40 percent, at best, of the 1,190,000 jobs lost in these three industries (29, 14.9, and 45.1 percent of the total industry labor force, respectively). In computer and electronic products, between 1998 and 2004, productivity increased by an astonishing 199.4 percent, while furniture and textile and apparel experienced more modest but nonetheless non-trivial increases (14.7 and 25.2 percent, respectively).[24]Manufacturing employment is not the same thing as total employment. Speed, Scale, and the Demand for Energy and Raw MaterialsThere have been concerns in recent years not just that China’s integration into the global economy will bring with it potentially destabilizing new supplies of labor, but also that its emergence will bring with it potentially destabilizing demands for energy, minerals, and other raw materials.[26] In 2004, China imported 14 percent of the global output of rubber, 15 percent of the global output of cotton, 18 percent of the global output of copper, and 20 percent of the global output of aluminum.[27] In 2004, China accounted for 8.2 percent of global oil consumption, 34.4 percent of global coal consumption, and 13.6 percent of all global energy consumption.[28] More significantly, China accounts for 28.2 percent of the increase in global oil consumption over the past ten years, and fully 35 percent of the increase in oil consumption over just the past two years. It was the world’s leading producer by a wide margin of copper, coal, zinc, iron ore, and lead.[30] Like the United States, Germany was a major coal exporter, and with its possession of the Ruhr, its vast iron and steel-iron industry relied exclusively on domestic sources of coal and iron.In the third quarter of the twentieth century, however–when Japanese real GDP growth averaged better than 9 percent annually–concerns about what this would mean for the future price and availability of energy, food, and other raw materials were expressed in terms remarkably similar to those being voiced about China today. Compared to China’s accounting for 8.1 percent of the global oil consumption today, in 1973 Japan accounted for as much as 9.4 percent. In 1969, 73 percent of all the copper imported into Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries went to Japan, as did 35 percent of the iron ore.[31]Concerns expressed about Japan took the form of very concrete projections about what Japan’s continued rapid growth would mean for future global demand and supply balances. In a 1972 study sponsored by the Japan Society of New York, Kazuo Sato found that even if Japan’s average annual rate of GDP were to fall to 8 percent per year, in 1980, 20 percent of all petroleum and 25 percent of all other raw materials entering international trade would be purchased by Japan.[32]Sato’s forecast implied that Japan would be consuming 9.9 million barrels of oil per day in 1980. Between 1973 and 1980 and 1985, rather than growing at annual rates of 8 to 10 percent, Japan–in part as a result of changes in global energy markets–grew at a more modest 4 to 4.5 percent. Based on historical evidence, these forecasts assumed that for every 1 percent GDP would grow, the demand for energy would likewise grow at 1 percent. As such, China should be importing capital and running a current account deficit rather than exporting capital and running a current account surplus that reached 3.2 percent of GDP in 2003, 4.2 percent in 2004, and that is projected to reach to 6.1 percent of GDP in 2005.[35] Even if the National Bureau of Statistics of China is correct and China’s GDP is underestimated by 16.8 percent, these are unusually large surpluses in relation to GDP. In each of these cases, accelerating productivity increases tended to be unanticipated and, in consequence, tended to run ahead of the money supply, consumption, and investment.[37] While neither the U.S., German, nor Japanese current account surpluses ever exceeded 2.5 percent of GDP during their years of fastest economic growth, in each case, their balance of payments surpluses did place significant stress on the international financial system.[38] In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the large American and German surpluses led the U.S. Treasury and the German Reichsbank to accumulate large stocks of gold. With unit labor costs in the United States falling relative to those of all of its major trading partners–particularly Japan–between 1965 and 1971, it is by no means clear that there was a loss of industrial competitiveness at all.[45] In the absence of oft-stated official concerns in the United States about the buildup of foreign reserves abroad, is it possible that the large component of this buildup that was driven by speculators might never have happened?In many respects, China seems to pose the same kind of concerns for the international financial system that the United States, Germany, and particularly Japan did in years past. In 2004, imports from China accounted for 15 percent of U.S. imports, while imports from Asia as a whole accounted for 40 percent. Imports from China have increased from 8 percent of total U.S. imports in 1998 to 15 percent in 2004. Today, as imports from China grow rapidly, the industries in the United States with which these imports compete are going through far-reaching structural changes, with imports occupying many times the share in American manufacturing consumption that they did in the years when imports from Japan were growing rapidly after 1965. Still more significant, by 1913, the emerging United States had the world’s highest per capita GDP, while Germany’s per capita GDP was about 70 percent of the U.S. level. In marked contrast, Chinese GDP per capita in 2004 may be no more than 15 percent, or at best 18 percent, of the U.S. level. Using purchasing power parities drawn from these new studies, it appears–even allowing for the underestimation of the size of China’s services sector–that China’s GDP is no more than 32.1 percent the GDP of the United States. National Bureau of Statistics of China, China Statistical Yearbook 2004.13 Council of Economic Advisers, Economic Report of the President 2005 (Washington, D.C.: Council of Economic Advisers, 2005), table B-47. In contrast, Chinese import penetration accounts for 79 percent of the increase in import penetration in the computers and electronic products market and 88 percent of the increase in import penetration of the furniture market.25.
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Interesting spin on ‘encore weddings.’ Read the article in it’s entirety here.A quick look at Encore Weddings by the Numbers:SECOND WEDDINGS BY THE NUMBERS5,000: Average cost of a second wedding0,500: Average income of bride if she works full time39: Average age of bride in second weddings68: Percentage of couples who register for giftsSource: Bride Again magazine reader surveysNot altogether true according to many of my clients experiences with encore weddings but interesting statistics nonetheless.
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The following new report appeared this past weekend at the Savannah Now Online web site, our response follows:### Quote ###Effingham woman rallies to evict sex offenderEric Curl | Sunday, June 17, 2007 at 12:30 amLakeside Farms resident Tammy Blackmon has been leading a charge to rid her Effingham County neighborhood of a convicted sex offender.Blackmon has been at it ever since she learned in early April the offender had moved behind her house and failed to register with county officials. She said she and other neighborhood residents are concerned their new neighbor poses a threat to their children.Melinda Lee Moore was arrested April 24 by Effingham County sheriff’s deputies after she moved into a home at (editor’s note: the paper published this woman’s address, we removed it for her safety) and subsequently was accused of failing to register as a sex offender in Effingham County. She is out of jail on bond, awaiting trial.Past convictionsIn 1995, records show, Moore pleaded guilty to five counts of child molestation and one count of sexual battery. In 1999, she was sentenced to 18 months in a detention center for violating her parole by providing alcohol to a minor.Blackmon said she and other Lakeside Farms residents have hung more than 200 posters throughout the neighborhood identifying Moore as a sex offender.Moore filed a harassment report against Blackmon in April after the fliers were posted.Moore could not be reached for comment because her telephone would not accept incoming calls.Blackmon said Moore should be ousted from the neighborhood because of her proximity to two school bus stops.A Georgia law still on the books has made it illegal for sex offenders to reside within 1,000 yards of areas where children congregate. That includes school bus stops. Moore lives about 500 yards from two bus stops on Zeigler Road.However, Effingham County Sheriff Jimmy McDuffie said he and his deputies cannot enforce the law covering bus stops because the Georgia Supreme Court has ruled it unconstitutional.And with nearly every sheriff in the state being sued by a north Georgia sex offender who was forced to move, the situation has grown even more problematic, he said.In addition, McDuffie said, at least 54 of the 68 registered sex offenders in Effingham County reside within 1,000 yards of a school bus stop, and he does not have the manpower or the resources to make them all move, even if he could do so under the law.Tough to keep upAdding to the challenge is the department’s difficulty in handling all the paperwork involved in tracking offenders.The sheriff’s department is required to keep updated lists of sex offenders at the department as well as at the county’s schools, the county administrative building and the libraries.McDuffie said the department also has a hard time verifying that sex offenders actually live at their registered addresses.He said he had to take all of his criminal investigators off their investigations Thursday just to get caught up on the verifications.McDuffie has explained the situation to the Effingham County Commission and said he is asking for funds to pay for a sex offender registrar in next year’s budget. But, the sheriff said, commissioners have indicated the new position would not be approved because it cannot be funded.I see it as a safety issue more so than just a position, McDuffie said. This is a serious situation.http://savannahnow.com/node/306921Corrections1A | Local NewsTuesday, June 19, 2007 at 12:30 amGeorgia law states sex offenders must not reside within 1,000 feet of areas where children congregate. The law has been put on hold pending a decision by Judge Clarence Cooper of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia. An article on Page 1B in Sunday’s editions contained incorrect information.http://savannahnow.com/node/307729### End Quote ###Our Reply to:Eric Curl-Effingham Now Reportereric.curl@savannahnow.comWayne Hodgin-Effingham Now Editorwayne.hodgin@savannahnow.comSusan Catron-Executive Editor Savannah Morning Newssusan.catron@savannahnow.comGale Baldwin-Managing Editor Savannah Morning Newsgale.baldwin@savannahnow.comDear Savannah Now Staff,First, I truly appreciate your report on this issue, however, we need to get past the myths and misinformation and speak to the truth and facts. Second, your original report (http://savannahnow.com/node/306921) was FILLED with misinformation and your correction (http://savannahnow.com/node/307729 ) was even more egregious. The School Bus Stop provision of HB1059 is the ONLY part of the law that has been stopped by Judge Cooper. ALL other provisions are in full force. I would suggest you contact the Southern Center for Human Rights to find out the FACTS regarding the lawsuit. Finally, are you aware that FEDERAL law prohibits the use of the Sex Offender Registry to threaten, intimidate, or harass any individual including registrants or family memberslink
This morning, I sent this e-mail to the Supt., Dir of Curriculum, and all of the Board of Ed members.As part of the Board’s review of professional development and curriculum this evening, I was wondering if you would consider focusing at least one full day of professional development next year to the needs of gifted learners in our schools?Since the demise of [our] well-regarded gifted learning program four years ago, which directly served about 100 students in grades K-8, very little has been implemented to ensure that every child’s learning needs are being met. The 2003 Minnesota study recommends that teachers receive not only professional development targeted to gifted learners, but also follow-up support so that they can actually make improvements in their classroom instruction.
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Officials have reported the spread of avian influenza outbreaks in two farms in Jaipurhat district, approximately 188 miles from Dhaka.
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