Unemployed woman sues N.Y. college

NEW YORK (AP) — A New York City woman who says she can't find a job is suing the college where she earned a bachelor's degree.
Trina Thompson filed a lawsuit last week against Monroe College in Bronx Supreme Court, The New York Post reports. The 27-year-old is seeking the $70,000 she spent on tuition.

Thompson says she's been unable to find gainful employment since she received her information technology degree in April.

She says the Bronx school's Office of Career Advancement hasn't provided her with the leads and career advice it promises.

Monroe College spokesman Gary Axelbank says Thompson's lawsuit is completely without merit.

The college insists it helps its graduates find jobs.

U.K. retailer withdraws padded bikini bras for kids

LONDON — A major British clothing retailer withdrew a children's bathing suit from sale Wednesday after a front-page tabloid story criticized the store for selling padded bras on bikinis aimed at 7-year-olds.
The bikinis also angered children's advocates and top candidates in Britain's upcoming national election, who say it was yet another product that sexualizes children and encourages them to grow up too fast.

"It's a shame it was ever put on the shelves in the first place," said Justine Roberts, founder of the Mumsnet, a parenting website that attracts a large, vocal audience. She nonetheless praised the decision to pull the bathing suit from the shelves.

Primark, a popular discount chain, is not the first retailer to draw criticism for offering padded bras for kids younger than 10. But the outcry of protest is prompting a growing number of companies to pledge support for Mumsnet's "Let Girls Be Girls" campaign.

The popular online forum said such clothing indoctrinates the idea that sexiness is the most important quality for girls and "encourages a culture in which children are viewed as sexually available."

Announcing the immediate withdrawal of the product, Primark promised to donate any profits already earned from the item to a children's charity. The product line, it added, "sells in relatively small quantities."

The retailer acted within hours of a front-page article in The Sun denouncing the product as a "paedo (pedophile) bikini." Politicians swiftly joined the clamor.

"Completely disgraceful," Conservative Party leader David Cameron said of the bikini. "The sort of country I want is one where it is not just the government (that) feels outraged about the early commercialization and sexualization of our children, but companies should stop doing it, they should take some responsibility."

Primark refused to discuss the bikini's padding but a source familiar with the product said the extra fabric was designed to preserve a girl's modesty and prevent any signs of a developing breast from showing through. She spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the topic.

There has long been a global concern that products and images may encourage the sexualization of children or direct sexual abuse at them. Barbie dolls have often been criticized for being unrealistically curvaceous. Teenage Disney star Miley Cyrus' bareback picture for Vanity Fair magazine was slammed for being too sexualized, as was 15-year-old Brooke Shields' ad for Calvin Klein jeans in which she said: "You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing."

The American Psychological Association, in a 2007 report on the sexualization of girls, raised concerns about other ad campaigns, such as Skechers' "naughty and nice" ad in 2004 featuring Christina Aguilera dressed as a pigtailed, lollipop-licking schoolgirl. The association also fretted about thongs for 7- to 10-year-olds with slogans such as "wink wink."

"If girls purchase — or ask their parents to purchase — products and clothes designed to make them look physically appealing and sexy, and if they style their identities after the sexy celebrities who populate their cultural landscape, they are, in effect, sexualizing themselves," the report said.

Researchers such as Penny Nicholls of The Children's Society, a British charity, say their studies show that commercial pressures toward premature sexualization and unprincipled advertising damage children's well-being.

"The evidence shows that adults feel children are more materialistic than in past generations, while children themselves feel under pressure to keep up with the latest trends," Nicholls said. "We need a significant change at the heart of society where adults stand up for better values."

A British government-commissioned report in February on the sexualization of young people called for retailers and parents' groups to jointly set guidelines for what is appropriate for different age groups.

"By over-emphasizing their sexuality through fashion, it may make it harder for girls to value themselves for other aspects of their identity," the report by psychologist Linda Papadopoulos said.

Primark, owned by Associated British Foods, has 138 stores in the United Kingdom, 38 Penneys stores in Ireland and shops in Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium. The Penneys stories in Ireland have no relationship to JC Penney stores.

how she broke into journalism and what our children need to know.

Maria Bartiromo elbowed her way onto the male-dominated New York Stock Exchange to become the first journalist to deliver daily, live broadcast segments from the floor. Despite facing criticism for entering the inner-sanctum of trading, Bartiromo persevered and now anchors two of her own news shows, CNBC's Closing Bell and the Wall Street Journal Report, rated as the most-watched financial news program.

In addition to her thriving journalism career, Bartiromo's new book, 10 Laws Of Enduring Success, offers up wisdom from notable public figures across industries--from Jack Welch to Gary Kasparov and Goldie Hawn. She's also created her own production company aimed at teaching children about money

World's Worst Countries For Jobs

Parmy Olson

Among the wealthiest nations, unemployment is rising fastest in Europe.

The world has been watching and waiting for signs that the economic crisis is coming to an end.

Unfortunately it's taking longer in some of the globe's richest and most socioeconomically generous nations.

In these places unemployment continues to rise, with no clear signs of leveling off.

Recent data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a wealthy-country think tank, have shown that among the world's 30 richest nations, including the United States, Japan and Germany, it is European countries that have seen unemployment increase the most in the last year.

European officials may be tied up with the debt problems of Greece, but the more widespread and keenly felt problem across certain parts of Europe is that of everyday people having difficulty finding a job.

Ireland's unemployment rate worsened the most dramatically over the last year. It stood at 13.8% in January, but that was a whopping 4.4-percentage-point increase from this time last year.

Back in 2008 the jobless rate was at just 6.3%.

Second-worst is the Slovak Republic, where the rate of unemployment rose by 4 points to 13.7%.

Spain still has the highest unemployment rate out of the advanced world--an eye-wateringly high 18.8% in January--and that's also marked a 3-point increase from January 2009.

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Though most of the countries in the OECD are European, the other nations in the club have fared better when it comes to keeping their jobless rates under control.

America's unemployment rate is still at a relatively high 9.7%, but that was a shift up of a fair 3 percentage points from the year before. In Japan the unemployment rate has risen by just 0.7 points to 4.9%, according to OECD data.

This is just a continuation of a trend that started with the credit crisis in 2008. Between that year and 2009, the biggest jumps in unemployment by region took place in the European Union and developed economies, where the overall jobless rate increased by 2.3 percentage points, according to the International Labor Organization.


While things leveled off in America and Japan, the outlook remains grim for Europe. Economic sentiment in the region has been improving in the last 10 months, according to the European Commission, but that rebound has already lost some of its momentum.

"The E.U. economy is still facing headwinds, and the outlook for the labor market remains unfavorable for 2010," the commission said in its latest monthly report on the region's employment situation.

This shouldn't be surprising considering that the American economy contracted by 2.7% in 2009, while the European Union's contracted by more than 4.1% last year, according to the International Monetary Fund. The sharpest declines took place in the emerging-market nations of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, none of which are members of the OECD.

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In developed Europe, the countries hardest hit are those that went through the boom and bust of a rapidly growing construction sector and soaring property prices.

Ireland, once hailed as the Celtic Tiger, now has one of the highest unemployment rates in Europe after thousands of construction workers--many of whom were on temporary contracts--lost their jobs and struggled to find work in other sectors.

Ireland's GDP plunged by 7.5% in 2009 and is expected to fall by another 1% this year, according to the country's Investment and Development Agency.

The national economy is also heavily dependent on trade--with exports representing 90% of GDP--so the slow recovery in world trade is exacerbating the country's problems.

In contrast Germany has managed to keep unemployment in check because its companies, many of them involved in engineering or high-tech manufacturing, employ highly skilled individuals who are difficult to replace.

Instead of firing workers, German companies try to shorten their hours; the government has a short-term plan of subsidizing wages where hours have been reduced.

Thanks to government spending, Germany has had one of the lowest increases in unemployment in the last year: Its 0.3-point increase is on par with Norway and Australia.

Denmark, Turkey, Iceland and Spain are a few other rich countries that have seen big jumps in unemployment in the last year.

While Spain and Iceland have suffered from construction and financial bubbles, the labor market troubles of Denmark are curious: The Danes have a relatively low unemployment rate of 7.3% and rank enviably high in terms of their standard of living.

Yet Denmark was the first country in Europe to dip into recession, thanks to a domestic property bust.

And Nevlia Konika, an economist with IHS Global Insight, points out that the Danish labor market is actually weakening as wages in the country grow, making its exports and services less competitive.

This could be a growing problem.

While emerging nations like China and Brazil make a speedy recovery from their recessions and traditional powerhouses Switzerland and Japan get back on their feet, some of Europe's largest economies are struggling to get their labor markets on track.

Even Germany may see its hefty government spending result in a bigger deficit that hits the job market down the line. Economists at Deutsche Bank expect the jobless rate in Germany to rise to 9.5% in 2011.

When it comes go jobs, Europe's troubles are far from over.

(MSN Arabia)

Spain wants women's equality to be part of EU economic strategy

Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said Sunday that women's equality should be a part of the European Union's new 10-year plan to make the bloc's economy more competitive.
Zapatero, whose country holds the rotating six-month presidency, said the the strategy set as one of its goals raising the female employment rate across the 27-nation EU to 70 percent by 2020.
It should also seek to make a "maximum" reduction in the wage gap between men and women, he said at the end of the two-day "Women for a Better World" conference in the Mediterranean port city of Valencia.
"I support the idea that the economic strategy for the next decade, known as the 2020 strategy, should include the basis for a more sustainable, balanced and innovative development that fully affirms equality between men and women," he said.
EU member states are currently hammering out the details of the "2020 strategy" which is to replace the 10-year "Lisbon strategy" agreed in 2000 and which was designed to make the bloc the most dynamic economy in the world by the end of this year.
More than 500 women from around the world, including Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Finnish President Tarja Halonen and over 50 government ministers, took part in the gathering which has been held annually since 2006.
In a video message played at the start of the meeting, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that ensuring that women have equal status and opportunities is the key to global prosperity.
"When women are afforded their rights and afforded equal opportunities in education, health care, employment and political participation, they help drive social and economic progress," she said.
"But when they are marginalised and mistreated as is still the case in too many places in Africa and around the world, broad and lasting progress is impossible. Empowering women is a key to global progress and prosperity."
It is the second time that Spain has hosted a Women for a Better World meeting after Madrid in 2007.
Mozambique hosted the first meeting in 2006. Others were held in Niger in 2008 and Liberia in 2009.