40 Percent of Unemployed Have Quit Looking for Jobs
May 21st, 2015Via: CNBC:
At a time when 8.5 million Americans still don’t have jobs, some 40 percent have given up even looking.
The revelation, contained in a new survey Wednesday showing how much work needs to be done yet in the U.S. labor market, comes as the labor force participation rate remains mired near 37-year lows.
A tight jobs market, the skills gap between what employers want and what prospective employees have to offer, and a benefits program that, while curtailed from its recession level, still remains obliging have combined to keep workers on the sidelines, according to a Harris poll of 1,553 working-age Americans conducted for Express Employment Professionals.
On the bright side, the number is actually better than 2014, the survey’s inaugural year, when 47 percent of the jobless said they had given up.
Britain: 1,400 Investigated in Child Sex Abuse Inquiry, Including 261 High-Profile Individuals
May 21st, 2015Via: Guardian:
Police across the country are investigating more than 1,400 men – including 261 high-profile individuals – over allegations of child abuse in the past, a senior officer running the national operation has revealed.
The scale of alleged child abuse across society – both recent and non-recent – was stark, said Ch Const Simon Bailey, who runs Operation Hydrant, the national coordinating team overseeing the various inquiries.
Figures from police forces in England and Wales published on Wednesday reveal that 1,433 men have been identified in reports of alleged abuse by victims, since the operation was set up in 2014.
Of these 216 are dead, 76 are politicians, both national and local figures, 43 are from the music industry, 135 from TV, film or radio and seven from the world of sport. The cases include recent high-profile convictions, including Rolf Harris, Gary Glitter and Max Clifford.
Hundreds of institutions have been identified by victims of non-recent abuse as places where their abuse took place. These include 154 schools, 75 children’s homes, 40 religious institutions, 14 medical establishments, 11 community groups, nine prisons or young offender institutions, nine sports venues and 28 other places including military establishments.
Bailey warned that the number of victims could run into the hundreds of thousands, and called for much more support for survivors of child abuse.
State of Emergency Declared for Oil Spill Off Santa Barbara Coast
May 20th, 2015More oil drilling for New Zealand?
Look and learn.
Via: NBC:
California Governor Jerry Brown on Wednesday issued an emergency proclamation for Santa Barbara County due to the effects of an oil spill near Refugio State Beach.
Oil floating off the Southern California coast after a spill from a broken oil pipe now stretches about 9 miles, an overnight expansion that was “more than we anticipated last night,” a U.S. Coast Guard captain said Wednesday.
The spill along the coast near Santa Barbara dumped possibly as much as 105,000 gallons of oil from a 2-foot pipeline onto the Refugio State Beach shore, creating miles-long slicks in the ocean after leaking for several hours before it was shut off.
The spill shut down popular El Capitan Beach and campground just days before the unofficial kick-off to the summer season, Memorial Day weekend, according to the Santa Barbara County Office of Emergency Management.
Wall Street’s Hot New Financial Product: Your Rent Check
May 20th, 2015Via: Mother Jones:
Over the last two years, private equity firms and hedge funds have amassed an unprecedented real estate empire, snapping up Spanish revivals in Phoenix, adobes in Los Angeles, Queen Anne Victorians in Atlanta, and brick-faced bungalows in Chicago. In total, Wall Street investors have bought more than 200,000 cheap, mostly foreclosed houses in some of the cities hardest hit by the economic meltdown. But they’re not simply flipping these houses. Instead, they’ve started bundling some of them into a new kind of financial product that could blow up the housing market all over again.
No company has bought more houses than the Blackstone Group, one of the world’s largest private equity firms. (Its many investments include Hilton Hotels, the Weather Channel, and SeaWorld. Among its institutional investors are Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, and JPMorgan Chase.) Through its subsidiary, Invitation Homes, Blackstone has picked up houses through local brokers, at foreclosure auctions, and in bulk purchases. Last April, it bought 1,400 houses in Atlanta in a single day. In Phoenix, some neighborhoods have a Blackstone-owned home on just about every block. As of November, Blackstone had acquired 40,000 houses, most of them foreclosures, worth $7.5 billion. Today, it is the largest owner of single-family rental homes in the nation.
Research Credit: ottilie
Teachers Using Pens and Paper in the Classroom “Not Fair” to Students, Microsoft Official Says
May 20th, 2015In other news, Microsoft Study Shows that Technology Is Shortening Attention Spans.
Via: The Georgia Straight:
Pens and paper have no place in the modern classroom. And chalkboards? They should be banished from our schools too.
That’s what Lia De Cicco Remu, director of Partners in Learning at Microsoft Canada, told the Georgia Straight ahead of the Microsoft Summit 2015 in Vancouver, which is set to be attended by around 200 teachers.
“When was the last time you used a piece of chalk to express yourself?” De Cicco Remu, a former teacher, asked by phone from Toronto. “Kids don’t express themselves with chalk or in cursive. Kids text.”
Related: Some Parents Who Work for Elite Silicon Valley Firms Send Their Children to School with No Computers
Los Angeles: Minimum Wage Going to $15 Per Hour by 2020
May 20th, 2015This is definitely a dire situation: CEOs Make 373 Times Average Worker Pay.
Increasing the minimum wage, while politically expedient, is going to spell doom for many small businesses. A relative earnings limit, on the other hand, could bring sanity to the wage inequality situation without destroying businesses that operate on smaller profit margins, thus maintaining a competitive marketplace.
Take the stick to the big money psychopaths, not Joe Small Business Owner.
Also, Los Angeles is so terrible. Flee while you can.
Via: Reuters:
The Los Angeles City Council voted on Tuesday to increase the minimum wage in the nation’s second-largest city to $15 an hour by 2020 from the current $9, in a victory for labor and community groups that have pushed for similar pay hikes in several U.S. municipalities.
The council’s 14-1 vote on the measure, which must come back before the panel for final approval, would require businesses with more than 25 employees to meet the $15 pay level by 2020, while smaller businesses would have an extra year to comply.
Officials said the plan, which comes on the heels of similar minimum wage hikes in other major cities including Seattle and San Francisco, would increase pay of an estimated 800,000 workers in the city.
“We are embarking upon, I think, the most progressive minimum wage policy anywhere in the country,” City Councilman Curren Price Jr., one of the main backers of the proposal, said before the vote.
With the federal minimum wage stagnant at $7.25 an hour since 2009, labor and religious groups have increasingly pressed local governments in liberal-leaning areas to enact their own minimum wage hikes even as their hopes dim for an increase from the Republican-controlled U.S. Congress.
The proposal given preliminary approval in Los Angeles, where housing costs are among the highest in the nation, represents a far-reaching victory for supporters of higher pay for low-wage workers.
The 67-percent pay increase would be implemented gradually, starting at $10.50 an hour for larger employers in 2016, and gradually going up each year until it reaches $15 in 2020.
Companies with 25 or fewer workers would follow a slightly slower stepped-up increase in minimum wage pay.
Opponents of minimum wage hikes, such as Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce senior vice president of public policy Ruben Gonzalez, say they place an undue burden on businesses, and would force employers to lay off workers or move.
“There is simply not enough room, enough margin in these businesses to absorb a 50-plus percent increase in labor costs over a short period of time,” he told the city council.
Mayor Eric Garcetti, who last year proposed a pay increase that would have brought the minimum wage to $13.25 by 2017, said in a statement that he planned to sign the council’s measure.
Related: Seattle Hikes Minimum Wage to $15 Per Hour
German Retail Giant Removes Glyphosate from 350 Stores
May 20th, 2015Via: Natural Society:
I recently snapped a photo from an advertising circular that was delivered to my home, proudly promoting Monsanto’s ‘probably carcinogenic’ Round Up, on sale no less, at a local hardware store. While US garden and DIY stores are still selling cancer-causing poison in a jug, a German retail giant will no longer carry glyphosate-containing products as of September 30, 2015.
More than 350 ‘toom Baumarkt DIY’ stores belonging to the REWE Group are removing any product that contains this endocrine disrupting chemical concoction, and as of today, no such products can be re-ordered from their stores.
Amputees Control Bionic Legs with Their Thoughts
May 20th, 2015Via: Reuters:
Amputees can control their bionic prosthetic limbs with their minds, thanks to tiny implanted myoelectric sensors (IMES) developed by Icelandic orthopedics company Ossur and surgically placed in a patient’s residual muscle tissue.
Ossur implanted tiny sensors in the residual muscle tissue of two amputees that they say trigger movement in the prosthesis via a receiver. Ossur President & CEO Jon Sigurdsson was due to announce in Copenhagen on Wednesday (May 20) that the two amputees are the first world-wide to be able to control their lower-limb prostheses subconsciously.
Policing, Mass Imprisonment, and the Failure of American Lawyers
May 20th, 2015Via: Harvard Law Review:
It did not surprise me that almost every child in the D.C. public high school class raised a hand when I asked if any of them had been stopped and searched by the police. When I told them that being stopped without reasonable suspicion that they were committing a crime is a violation of the United States Constitution, one of the students corrected me: “No, you don’t understand, these are the Jumpouts, not the police. They’re allowed to do that.” I’m used to people laughing in disbelief when I do constitutional rights trainings in heavily policed communities. But when I heard those words, my heart sank. In front of me was a child in whose world being stopped and frisked was so regular, such a fact of everyday life, that he had reasonably concluded that it must be lawful. This child was growing up believing that his suspicious body could be probed at will by government employees. One by one, the students described to me the routine that they had developed to turn and face the nearest wall while officers searched through their backpacks and pockets on the way home from school. Like many of the problems in the criminal legal system, there is no genuine dispute that these and more serious illegalities are happening on a massive scale. In the seven years that I have spent working in American courts and jails, one thing sticks out above all else: the divergence between the law as it is written and the law as it is lived.
The contemporary system of American policing and incarceration puts human beings in cages at rates unprecedented in American history and unparalleled in the modern world. It is a considerable bureaucratic achievement to accomplish the transfer of thirteen million bodies each year from their homes and families and schools and communities into government boxes of concrete and metal. It is also a failure of the legal profession.
The Death of Sgt James Brown Inside El Paso County Jail
May 19th, 2015Via: KFOX14:
