Manhood and Football

ESPN, the Worldwide Breeder of ludicrous sports programming, reached a new low this week. The Network that brought you the biggest non-event on the annual sports calendar, the NFL draft, and then took it down another notch by televising the announcement of the NFL schedule, outdid itself once again by having a countdown to the unveiling of Mel Kiper’s mock draft. Did anyone care? Is Mel anything more than a parody of himself? Has ESPN totally lost its way? (The correct answers are no, no, and maybe.

China's Blue Book of Oceania

The Chinese government’s interest in Oceania bumped up another notch with the recent publication of the book’s second edition. Blue Books are made available to all government departments, stocked in Xinhua Bookstores across China, and are seen as the standard reference on any given topic. This edition, subtitled China’s 21st Century Maritime Silk Road Initiative and the South Pacific Countries (Yu 2015), reveals how far Chinese academic and government thinking on the Pacific has come in recent years. This In Brief describes findings on aid, trade and investment, and diplomacy that should be of interest to Australian policy-makers.AusAI

8 Ways To Teach spelling, punctuation and grammar

For many English teachers, teaching Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar (SPaG) is daunting. The stakes have always been high: if your pupils are not good spellers, struggle to punctuate correctly and have a tendency to use non-standard forms in their writing, then invariably they won’t achieve highly, particularly in exams. Since the beginning of this decade, the stakes ramped up another notch with Conservative Education Secretaries and ministers imposing SPaG tests on primary schools and insisting on more weighting on SPAG in GCSE and A-Level English/English Literature exams. This has raised anxieties considerably. This article aims to provide some tried and tested ways to diffuse some of these worries, drawing together the best research and practice

Monetary policy report to the congress

The subpar performance of the U.S. economy extended into the first half of 2003. Although accommodative macroeconomic policies and continued robust productivity growth helped to sustain aggregate demand, businesses remained cautious about spending and hiring. All told, real gross domestic product continued to rise in the first half of the year but less quickly than the economy's productive capacity was increasing, and margins of slack in labor and product markets thereby widened further. As a result, underlying inflation remained low--and, indeed, seems to have moved down another notch. In financial markets, longer-term interest rates fell, on net, over the first half of the year as the decline in inflation and the subdued performance of the economy led market participants to conclude that short-term interest rates would be lower than previously anticipated. These lower interest rates helped to sustain a rally in equity prices that had begun in mid-March. The Federal Reserve expects economic activity to strengthen later this year and in 2004, in part because of the accommodative stance of monetary policy and the broad-based improvement in financial conditions. In addition, fiscal policy is likely to be stimulative as the provisions of the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 go into effect and as defense spending continues to ramp up. Severe budgetary pressures are causing state and local governments to cut spending and to increase taxes and fees, but these actions should offset only a portion of the impetus from the federal sector. Moreover, the continued favorable performance of productivity growth should lift household and business incomes and thereby encourage capital spending. Given the ongoing gains in productivity and the existing margin of resource slack, aggregate demand could grow at a solid pace for some time before generating upward pressure on inflation.Economic conditions - United States ; Monetary policy - United States

17 July 2009 Jakarta bombing: the aftermath and longer-term implications

Although the carnage in Indonesia was not as great or as bloody as in 2002, 2003 or 2005, the political lessons to be learned in the immediate aftermath of the July 17 2009 bombing are not to be neglected. There are also various implications of the outrage on Indonesia’s self-confidence which bear reflection as the world’s most populous Muslim nation and Southeast Asia’s largest economy moves towards playing a regional role with global reach, which was how President Susilo Bambang Yodhoyono (SBY) had described it in a lecture at the LSE on 31 March 2009

The reaction of interest rates to the employment report: the role of policy anticipations

Interest rates have reacted strongly to the monthly employment report in recent years. The authors document the reaction of rates to the report and provide evidence that it has been stronger since the mid-1980s than in earlier years. Evidently the report now has greater impact than formerly on expectations of where the Fed is going to move the federal funds rate. These expectations influence longer-term money market rates.Interest rates ; Employment (Economic theory) ; Monetary policy