Word: rulings
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...landslide victory that Hatoyama called "the first ever proper change in government in the history of our constitutional politics." Indeed, by electing DPJ members to 308 of 480 seats in the Japanese parliament's lower house, voters ended a half-century of nearly unbroken rule by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) - providing an unprecedented rebuke to the country's political élite, at the same time issuing a mandate for lawmakers with fresh ideas to address Japan's protracted economic malaise and growing societal ills. (Read "Will an Opposition Victory Rescue Japan's Economy...
...says he needs time to build institutions, and he's right. As we've seen in Zimbabwe, elections with the present institutions are no guarantee of change." In 2008, Mugabe unleashed a fresh wave of repression against the MDC after losing a general election, violence that ultimately prolonged his rule. The fervent hope among the MDC's impatient supporters is that change will precede the death of the old tyrant, who is visibly frail these days, but whose demise might still be years away...
...insider's confession of why our present economic moment is fraught with both danger and opportunity. There appears to be, Summers told the suddenly very attentive crowd, a strange bit of physics working itself out in our economy. The problem is related to a hiccup in an economic rule called Okun's law. First mooted by economist Arthur Okun in 1962, the law (it's really more of a rule of thumb) says that when the economy grows, it produces jobs at a predictable rate, and when it shrinks, it sheds them at a similarly regular pace...
...What made Summers' frank comment important is that it suggests this just-add-gas relationship may now be malfunctioning. The American economy has been shedding jobs much, much faster than Okun's law predicts. According to that rough rule, we should be at about 8.5% unemployment today, not slipping toward 10%. Something new and possibly strange seems to be happening in this recession. Something unpredicted by the experts. "I don't think," Summers told the Peterson Institute crowd - deviating again from his text - "that anyone fully understands this phenomenon." And that raises some worrying questions. Will creating jobs be that...
...unusual kind of course at Harvard. There aren’t that many courses where students literally have their hands in the dirt.” The small but well-edited collection in the Peabody Museum explores three aspects of life at 17th-century Harvard: negotiations of social status, rule breaking and religion, and literacy and the Indian College. Artifacts related to the serving and eating of food provide evidence of social tensions. Shards of dishes and tableware point to officially mandated classism; wealthy students paid double the normal tuition, and in return ate delicacies such as fruit on tables...