By Jennifer Ablan

Fri Feb 10, 2012 8:35pm EST

(Reuters) – It isn’t often you see the words “love”, “romance”, and “Federal Reserve” in the same sentence.

But on Friday, the central bank and many economists who spend countless hours monitoring its decisions began their Valentine’s Day flirtations a bit early.

It started with Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, who tweeted this morning: “You’re my long-run target; my nominal anchor” – with the attached hashtag, #FedValentines.

For those who aren’t steeped in FedSpeak, what Wolfers was referring to was the Fed’s inflation benchmarks.

Within minutes, some top economists in the United States had chimed in with their own take on Cupid. They included Austan Goolsbee, who was previously President Barack Obama’s top economist and is now professor of economics at University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Some of the Fed’s regional arms – the San Francisco Fed, Philadelphia Fed and Atlanta Fed – weighed in, as did a number of academics and journalists.

“I am surprised by all of this,” Wolfers said in a phone interview. “My Twitter stream is filled with geeks, nerds and policy wonks and I thought we’d have nerdy fun. It ended up far more viral than I had anticipated. It went from completely nerdy to sometimes dirty tweets.”

The only unofficial rule was that the tweets had to be written using the Fed’s often obscure terminology. The resulting declarations ranged from pure romance to cute overtures and racier fare.

Here’s a selection from Twitter (Reuters didn’t confirm the identities of all of the tweeters):

Alan Beattie @alanbeattie I’d like to borrow you overnight and then hold you to maturity #FedValentines

Austan Goolsbee @Austan_Goolsbee #fedvalentines Roses are red. Violets are pink. Don’t listen to goldbugs. No one cares what they think.

SanFranciscoFed @SFFedReserve I’m going to extraordinary measures to increase your stimulus #fedvalentines

Heidi N. Moore @moorehn After a romantic stroll down Maiden Lane, I just want to jump into your ARMs. #Fedvalentines

Atlanta Fed @AtlantaFed I long for you as the economy longs for its long-run maximum potential #FedValentines

ChicagoFed @chicagofed Roses are red, these tweets are great, would you like to learn about our dual mandate? #fedvalentines

Rob Blackwell @ABWashBureau You’re a systemic risk? to my heart. #Fedvalentines

NPR’s Planet Money @planetmoney I’ll be your lover of last resort. #FedValentines

SanFranciscoFed @SFFedReserve My love is elastic, my commitment too big to fail #fedvalentines

Econtourage @Econtourage Hey girl, you’re the only number in my little beige book #fedvalentines — Econtourage @freakonomics

Joseph Weisenthal @TheStalwart Roses are red, violets are blue, let’s keep pumping until we achieve

Article source: PRNewswire

NEW YORK |
Fri Feb 10, 2012 1:03pm EST

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Despite economic woes, wars, conflicts and natural disasters the world is a happier place today than it was four years ago and Indonesians, Indians and Mexicans seem to be the most contented people on the planet.

More than three-quarters of people around the globe who were questioned in an international poll said they were happy with their lives and nearly a quarter described themselves as very happy.

“The world is a happier place today and we can actually measure it because we have been tracking it,” said John Wright, senior vice president of Ipsos Global, which has surveyed the happiness of more than 18,000 people in 24 countries since 2007.

But he added that expectations of why people are happy should be carefully weighed.

“It is not just about the economy and their well being. It is about a whole series of other factors that make them who they are today.”

Brazil and Turkey rounded out the top five happiest nations, while Hungary, South Korea, Russia, Spain and Italy had the fewest number of happy people.

Perhaps proving that money can’t buy happiness, residents of some of the world biggest economic powers, including the United States, Canada and Britain, fell in the middle of the happiness scale.

“There is a pattern that suggests that there are many other factors beyond the economy that make people happy, so it does provide one element but it is not the whole story,” said Wright.

“Sometimes the greatest happiness is a cooked meal or a roof over your head,” he explained. “Relationships remain the No. 1 reason around the world where people say they have invested happiness and maybe in those cultures family has a much greater degree of impact.”

Regionally Latin America had the highest number of happy people, followed by North America, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East and Africa. Only 15 percent of Europeans said they were very happy.

On a more personal note married couples tended to be happier than singles but men seemed to be as content as women. Education and age also had an impact with more people under 35 saying they are very happy than 25-49 year olds. Higher education also equated with higher happiness.

(Reporting by Patricia Reaney; editing by Jill Serjeant)

Article source: PRNewswire

By Zakia Abdennebi

RABAT |
Thu Feb 9, 2012 12:41pm EST

RABAT (Reuters) – The leaders of a Moroccan Islamist group, who were jailed over what campaigners say were trumped-up charges and then released last week, said on Thursday they owed their freedom to the “Arab Spring” and called for other captives to be freed.

Under pressure to reform after the upheavals last year around the Middle East, Morocco for the first time elected an Islamist-led government which has set about reversing what it said were repressive policies under the previous authorities.

In the strongest signal yet of the new approach, Morocco’s King Mohammed issued pardons last week to the leaders of a group called Salafia Jihadia which officials had accused of being linked to violent Islamist militant attacks.

“We are free thanks to the Arab Spring,” said one of the group’s leaders, Hassan Kettani, who had been serving a 20-year jail sentence until his release last weekend.

“In this context, our country carried out reforms to avoid the kind of tragedies that happened in other Arab countries … Part of the peaceful resolution that our country has chosen is to resolve the issue of prisoners of conscience,” he said.

But the freed men said there were still dozens of innocent Islamists in jail. Rights groups say over the past decade, many Islamists have been convicted on fabricated charges or on the strength of false confessions extracted under torture.

“One of the priorities for us is the release of all the people imprisoned for their beliefs and to have them return to their families,” said Mohamed Rafiki, another of the freed leaders of the group.

The group’s leaders were convicted of encouraging militant violence and, in particular, of inspiring a coordinated wave of suicide bombings in Morocco’s commercial capital, Casablanca, in 2003 which killed 45 people. They all deny the charges.

Unlike other countries affected by the “Arab Spring,” Morocco did not overthrow its rulers. The king, head of the Arab world’s longest-serving dynasty, still holds supreme executive authority.

However, under pressure from protests galvanized by the revolts elsewhere, the monarch ceded some of his powers to elected officials and called an early parliamentary election which was won by a moderate Islamist party.

(Editing by Andrew Heavens)

Article source: PRNewswire

By David Alexander

WASHINGTON |
Thu Feb 9, 2012 7:42pm EST

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Pentagon unveiled a new policy on Thursday that will expand job opportunities for women in the military but shift them closer to the fighting, rekindling the issue of women in combat.

The move is part of a Pentagon effort to begin eliminating some of the gender-based discrimination that has prevented greater diversity in the overall force. It came in response to recommendations a year ago from a Military Leadership Diversity Commission mandated by Congress.

Under the new rules, the Defense Department would continue to prohibit women from serving in infantry, armor and special operations units whose main function is to engage in front-line combat, defense officials said.

Asked why women who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan conducting security details and house-to-house searches were still formally being barred from combat positions, the officials said the services wanted to see how they performed in the new positions before opening up further.

“Secretary (Leon) Panetta believes that this is the beginning, not the end of a process,” Pentagon Press Secretary George Little told a briefing. “The services will continue to review positions and requirements to determine what additional positions may be opened to women.”

The rule changes would allow women access to 14,000 jobs they had previously been barred from pursuing, from tank mechanics to rocket-launcher crew members. They would still be barred from 238,000 jobs, nearly a fifth of the total force, mainly infantry and special forces posts.

“But the good news is that 14,000 are being opened,” said Virginia Penrod, deputy assistant secretary of defense for military personnel policy, who herself broke gender barriers in the 1970s when she was stationed in North Dakota – in a job that had been considered too cold for women.

Defense officials noted that 10 years of combat had made it clear that some of the military’s gender-based restrictions were obsolete because the battlefields faced by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan had no clear front lines and no obvious ways to limit exposure to the fighting.

Officials said 144 women had been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, about 2 percent of U.S. deaths in those wars. Some 280,000 women have been deployed to the war zones over the past decade, about 12 percent of the U.S. total.

The Pentagon’s plan to change its rules now goes to Congress, which has a period of time to review the policy shift before it goes into effect, probably sometime

Article source: PRNewswire

By Jan Paschal

NEW YORK |
Wed Feb 8, 2012 7:38pm EST

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Designer Carolina Herrera didn’t grow up dreaming of a fashion career. Born in Caracas, Venezuela, she spent her childhood riding horses and pursuing favorite pastimes on the family estate.

But fashion became her calling and after a lifetime of design, winning awards and providing red carpet looks for stars ranging from Oscar winner Renee Zellweger to Grammy winner Lady Gaga, industry watchers know that family is the thread that runs through Herrera’s personal and professional success.

“Maybe fashion was sleeping in me and suddenly it woke up,” Herrera, 73, told Reuters. “Because when I was growing up, my great interest was my horses, tennis and that’s it, and dogs and normal life, not about fashion.”

A huge portrait of the designer by Andy Warhol, a memento of her night-clubbing years in the 1970s with superstar peers such as Mick Jagger, hung in her showroom behind her as she spoke with Reuters in an interview ahead of the February 13 debut of her latest collection at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in New York.

Her office is filled with art books and framed family photos, and two silver statuettes from the Council of Fashion Designers of America — the Geoffrey Beene Lifetime Achievement Award she received in 2008 and the Womenswear Designer of the Year Award in 2004 — take a prominent place.

With her Fall 2012 runway show set for Monday, Herrera talked about her 30 years in fashion and how she built her New York-based company, the privately held Carolina Herrera Ltd., into a global billion-dollar brand.

A FAMILY AFFAIR

Her mother, who was “a very romantic, poetic, cultivated woman,” her grandmother and the other women in her family loved haute couture, prizing “the craftsmanship that made them as beautiful on the inside as on the outside,” she said.

Herrera saw her first fashion show at age 13 when her grandmother took her to see the Balenciaga collection. When she was almost 16, she began to wear stylish clothes to dances and parties. She married young and her first marriage ended in divorce. A second marriage, to childhood friend Reinaldo Herrera who has ties to Spanish nobility, has lasted.

As a young mother who belonged to the jet set, Herrera caught the eye of photographers with her regal beauty and exquisite taste in clothes. She became a fixture on the best-dressed List in the 1970s and wound up in its Hall of Fame.

But

Article source: PRNewswire