New York, NY, United States (AHN) – Men are at it again. They are buying more–for themselves.

The male shopper, who laid low at the onset of the recession, is back. He is buying more and spending more, and retailers are delighted.

Men are not just purchasing suits, dress shirts, ties and shoes. They are rivaling their female counterparts by loading up on accessories. They are buying bracelets, bags, hats, umbrella, belts, scarves, pocket squares, caps, metal cuffs –you name it.

Some industry forecasters predict sales growth for men’s clothing and accessories during the first three months of 2012 will set a 20-year high.

In a move to make traditional women’s accessories more appealing to men, some designers are giving them manly monikers. A bracelet is dubbed wristwear, and a purse is called a holdall.

Men were well represented at last week’s New York Fashion Week, and male adornments took center stage.

Spending on accessories is driving the men’s category. In the last half of 2011, sales grew 14 percent to about $6 billion, according to market research firm NPD Group. The trend is expected to continue.

The return of the male shopper could help pick up retail sales. And, the rebound in male shopping may also bode well for the unemployment rate. It may reflect an improved jobs picture for men.

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New York, NY, United States (AHN) – Stocks opened sharply higher Friday after the Labor Department reported the U.S. economy created jobs at the fastest pace in nine months.

Shortly after the opening bell on Wall Street, the Dow Jones Industrial Average soared 113 points, the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index rose 12 points and the NASDAQ jumped 28 points.

Oil was up 64 cents to $97.13, and gold was lower by $7, last trading at $1,752.50 a troy ounce.

The Labor Department reported that nonfarm payrolls jumped by 243,000 in January, the most since April, and far exceeding economists’ expectations of a gain of just 150,000.

The strong jobs reports put the unemployment rate to a near three-year low of 8.3 percent and buoyed investor sentiment.

Market watchers will also be watching the big game Sunday. For the past 36 of 45 Super Bowls, the stock market has gone up after a win by an original National Football League team, one that traces its roots to before the merger with the American Football League, and gone down when the AFL (or newer team) is victorious.

So, Wall Street wants the Giants to win the Super Bowl.

The measure has an 80 percent accuracy rate based on the Dow Jones Industrial Averages’ annual performance.

There is not any science to it, but it is still as reliable as it gets for stock forecasting.

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Kathmandu, Nepal (AHN) – Hundreds of Nepalese Gurkha soldiers are expected to lose their jobs in the British army in the defense ministry’s latest round of reduction in military strength.

“As part of further work on defense restructuring the British Army has announced today (17 January 2012) the arrangements for a second phase of Army redundancies,” a statement released by the British Embassy in Kathmandu said.

Around 400 Gurkhas are expected to be made redundant out of the 2,900 positions to be cut.

The Brigade of Gurkhas in the British Army has 3,740 soldiers. They have been the part of the British army for almost 200 years.

The defense review, which was published in 2010, demanded 7,000 job losses, but that figure more than doubled last year as the Ministry of Defense struggled to contain its ballooning budget. The ministry argues that the Gurkha brigade has grown too big in recent years, and is bound to face further cuts.

Opponents of the reduction say the soldiers, who are recruited from Nepal, are an easy target. A “Save the Gurkha” petition has been launched by the same group that fought successfully for the Gurkhas to have the same rights as other soldiers.

The Brigade of Gurkhas has been growing in size since modernization in 2007, which also allowed them to serve for 22 years instead of 15.

According to the British media, around 140 Gurkhas lost their jobs in the first wave of defense cuts last year.

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DC, Washington, United States (AHN) – The U.S. Conference of Mayors wrapped up its winter meeting Friday in Washington, D.C., with Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel stepping into controversies on same sex marriage and education.

Emanuel joined about 80 other mayors from across the nation in endorsing laws to give legal recognition to same sex marriage, along with the tax breaks and other benefits spouses can share.

The mayors signed on to a statement that said, “Our cities derive great strength from their diversity and gay and lesbian families are a crucial part. Studies have shown what we know through our hands-on experience that cities that celebrate and cultivate diversity are the places where creativity and ideas thrive.”

Emanuel supported the Illinois Legislature’s effort last year to legalize civil unions for same-sex couples.

He said New York did “a good thing” last June when state lawmakers legalized gay marriage.

In separate comments Friday, Emanuel discussed his plan to turn Chicago’s community colleges into training institutions for the city’s employers.

Currently, Chicago’s City Colleges have a graduation rate of about 7 percent and job prospects for graduates that are “not as high,” Emanuel said.

His plan calls for each of the city’s seven community colleges to operate with specialties, such as health care, transportation, hospitality and manufacturing.

In addition, employers would be brought in to develop curricula that would train the students to become their employees.

“I want it to have economic value” to attend college, Emanuel said at the downtown Washington hotel where about 250 mayors were meeting.

Turning colleges into job training institutions is controversial among some academics, who say a well-rounded education requires liberal arts courses that include literature, history and the arts.

Nevertheless, job creation and recovery from the economic disaster of the Great Recession were dominant themes throughout the meeting this week.

The U.S. Conference of Mayors released a report that said the nation’s metropolitan areas will struggle for five more years to regain jobs lost during the recession that started in September 2008.

“The recovery is very uneven across U.S. regions, with the southeastern and southwestern metro [areas that] were the most affected by the housing bubble looking ahead to years of recovery,” the report says.

U.S. nonfarm payrolls will grow about 1.3 percent this year, which is unlikely to reduce the unemployment rate below 8 percent, according to a report by IHS Global Insight.

The report predicts the nation will regain nearly half the jobs lost during the Great Recession by the end of 2012.

The mayors used the economic report to try to prod Congress to approve legislation that would create more jobs.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, president of the Conference of Mayors, said “Congress has jumped ship” in its obligation to stimulate the economy and employment.

However, Villaraigosa acknowledged cities will have a hard time squeezing money out of Congress at a time the federal government is trying to reduce its deficit by cutting spending.

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Berlin, Germany (AHN) – Germany’s unemployment rate dropped to 6.8 percent in December from 6.9 percent in November, its lowest rate since 1991, according to the German Federal Labor Agency.

Strong German exports are behind the lower unemployment rate.

The seasonally adjusted number of jobless persons fell by 22,000 to 2.88 million in December, marking a new record low rate for unified Germany since those figures were first published in 1991. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. The jobless rate had risen as high as 12 percent after the Wall fell, because some industries died in parts of the old East Germany.

However, cities there such as Leipzig are attracting manufacturing because wages are lower than in the West.

About 40 million people, or half the 82 million German population, now have jobs, with half a million of those jobs created during 2011.

Nevertheless, economists warn that growth will likely slow this year in line with other eurozone nations. That would cause a loss of jobs and downward pressure on wages.

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London, United Kingdom (AHN) – Unemployment in the United Kingdom has hit a 17-year high, rising to 8.3 percent for the second quarter of the year up from 7.9 percent the previous quarter.

The number of jobless people in the UK increased by 128,000 to 2.64 million in the three months ending in October. That was the highest level seen since the three months ending in January 1996.

Meantime, the number of job openings dropped by 455,000.

Observers expect the worsening unemployment problem will put pressure on Prime Minister David Cameron to do more to achieve growth in the economy and to ease up on austerity measures.

The number of unemployed people claiming the Jobseeker’s Allowance rose by 3,000 to 1.6 million in November. In addition, the number of employed people dropped by 63,000 to 29.11 million compared to three months earlier.

Ongoing job losses in the public sector are to blame for much of the decrease in the number of working-age people with jobs in the UK. The private sector has only created one job for every 13 lost in the public sector.

Moreover, while the number of job vacancies continues to fall, the number of long-term unemployed continues to rise.

Those who have been jobless for 12 months or longer now account for one in three of all the unemployed and increased to 868,000 from 849,000 three months earlier.

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New York, NY, United States (AHN) – U.S. stocks soared higher Friday after new data showed that inflation does not appear to be a problem.

Just after the opening bell on Wall Street, the Dow Jones Industrial Average jumped 82 points, the Standard and Poor’s 500 Index was up 10 points and the NASDAQ rose 20 points.

Giving stocks an edge up was the Consumer Price Index, the government’s key measure of inflation, which showed prices barely budged in October, and that in the past 12 months prices were up 3.4 percent, nearly unchanged from a 3.5 percent annual inflation rate in October.

Gas prices fell 2.4 percent in the month, but were still up 19.7 percent for the year. Food prices rose a scant 0.1 percent in November, and 4.7 percent year-over-year.

The CPI measure of inflation comes from a broad range of goods ranging from food to gas to clothing to health care services to cars.

Overall, wages are still lagging inflation. Average hourly earnings rose just 1.8 percent in the 12 months ending in November, and the unemployment rate hovers just below 9 recent.

Oil was unchanged in morning trading at $93.70 a barrel, and gold gained some ground, trading higher by $15 at $1,590 a troy ounce.

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Washington, D.C., United States (AHN) – Employers added 120,000 jobs, the nation’s official unemployment rate dropped to 8.6 percent and the percentage of working-age Americans with a job dropped to 64 percent during November, the U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics announced Friday.

The drop in the unemployment rate was a combination of some people getting jobs while other long-term unemployed people gave up looking and were no longer counted as unemployed.

The 120,000 jobs were the bare minimum needed to keep up with growth in the labor force because from 120,000 to 200,000 people enter the labor force for the first time in their lives each month. That number of jobs is not sufficient to begin putting a dent in the millions of jobs that were either lost or not created during the recession.

Still, the official 8.6 percent unemployment rate was a drop of 0.4 percentage points from the 9.0 percent unemployment in October, while the 64 percent labor force participation rate was a 0.2 percentage point drop from the 64.2 percent of working-age Americans who were employed in October.

Among various groups, the unemployment rate was:

• adult men 8.3 percent
• whites 7.6 percent
• adult women 7.8 percent
• teenagers 23.7 percent
• blacks 15.5 percent
• Hispanics 11.4 percent

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NYC, NY, United States (AHN) – Clothes make the man, and more and more men are making the move to more fashionable attire.

That increased interest and demand may turn out to be a particularly bright spot for retail sales this holiday season.

Total U.S. men’s apparel sales rose 6.5 percent to $53.7 billion in the year through September, outpacing the 1.2 percent rise in women’s wear, according to market researcher NPD Group.

And, it wasn’t t-shirts, sweats, sneakers and jerseys that were driving sales. Men’s tailored clothing, including suits and sports coats, jumped 10.8 percent, and men’s dress shirts gained 2.3 percent.

The increase in men’s apparel was apparent during the period across all price points and all ages.

Younger men are buying more expensive suits and older men are paying more attention to “casual to work” wear. Polo shirts and khakis are not enough anymore.

Despite the high unemployment rate, men’s dress shirts and ties are still strong sellers. Express Inc., known for its causal clothes, is expected to sell one million neckties this year, and anticipates that dress shirts will be one of its strongest categories.

Coach Inc., recognized for its high-end leather handbags and accessories, is aggressively opening men’s stand-alone stores and dual gender shops.

Looks like many males are attune to the fact that a well dressed man never goes unnoticed.

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Ankara, Turkey David Rosenberg / The Med – The 7.2-magnitude earthquake that struck eastern Turkey points up the great economic divide between the country’s thriving west and an east in long-term decline.

The Oct. 23 tremor and a series of aftershocks took an estimated 600 lives as of the latest count and left thousands more homeless, but the area at the epicenter – the city of Van with a population just over 1 million – is so bereft of industry and infrastructure that the cost of reconstruction will have little impact on the country’s economy.

Reconstruction efforts may give a boost to the economy but it might just as well deter development by serving as a reminder of how risky the area is, not only to natural disaster but to renewed conflict between militants and the Turkish army in the largely Kurdish region.

“It happened in a place there almost no industrial manufacturing, no major economic activity, mainly in rural areas so it won’t be significant in such a big economy,” Yarkin Cebeci, economist at JP Morgan Chase in Istanbul, told The Media Line. “It could facilitate some investments into the region. The capacity in the region has been to a large extent limited. Rebuilding will be done with new technology.”

The earthquake brought economic activity to a halt in the eastern province due to the destruction and closure of banks. Many lenders, both state-owned and private, have said they will postpone repayments owed by farmers and small business owners in the province.

A week later in Ercis, the town hit hardest by the quake, the Reuters news agency reported that some shops had finally reopened, electricity was back on line in some parts of town and one bank’s ATM was put into service. But concerned about aftershocks, barely any of the city’s nearly 100,000 residents have returned to their damaged homes.

EQECAT, a California-based catastrophe modeler, estimates that total damage caused by the quake is likely to be in the “low single-digit billions” of dollars, compared with Turkey’s nearly $1 trillion economy. That’s about one-tenth of the damage that was caused by the 7.6-magnitude 1999 Izmit earthquake in Turkey’s west that left nearly 20,000 dead.

In the intervening years, the gap between east and west has only grown as the economic boom Turley has enjoyed since 2002 has mainly benefited the metropolitan areas along the country’s Mediterranean coast. In spite of programs to develop the southeast, the region suffers net migration as people seek industrial jobs in the west, according to a report by Euromonitor International, a London-based market research firm.

Between 2005 and 2010, greater Istanbul’s population expanded by almost 38 percent to 12.1 million and is projected to reach 17.8 million by 2020, or more than a quarter of the country’s total, Euromonitor said. The value of goods and service produced by Istanbul and environs amounted to 28 percent of the country’s total, it said.

By comparison, the southeast is mired in poverty and unemployment. Nearly a third of the country’s poor – defined at 50 percent of median household disposable income – lived in the southeast, Euromonitor said. Its unemployment rate in 2010 was 12.4 percent, 0.5 percentage points higher than the national average. But that understates the extent of the problem because the proportion of economically active people in the southeast was low.

Households in Istanbul spent an average of $43,670 on consumer goods in 2010, versus $19,294 in southeast Anatolia. A nationwide minimum wage level has probably had the effect of lifting incomes, but may also be discouraging investment in the region, which can’t make up for its deficiencies by competing for lower-wage jobs.

“With poor infrastructure, less affluent consumers and yet an equally high minimum wage, the east in unable to compete with the west,” the report said.

Southeast Anatolia’s woes are likely to be compounded by a sharp slowdown in Turkey’s economy that was already on its way even before the earthquake struck. The International Monetary Fund is projecting gross domestic product growth will decelerate to 2.2 percent next year from 6.6 percent in 2011.

Last week, Turkey’s central bank struck another blow to economic growth by effectively ending its low-interest rate policy by reducing the availability of loans at the benchmark weekly rate of 5.75 percent and making banks more reliant on shorter-term rates of up to 12.5 percent.

“The latest moves by the central bank certainly trigger a slowdown in monetary lending and credit extension, which will have a negative impact on the country’s growth prospects,” said Sinan Ulgen, an expert on Turkish politics at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Brussels, told The Media Line.

Lying at the intersection between the Arabian and Eurasian tectonic plates, Turkey is prone to earthquakes. Besides the 1999 shaker in the west, eastern Anatolia was struck in 1976 by a magnitude-7.3 earthquake that destroyed several villages and killed 3,000 to 5,000 people. In 1939, a magnitude-7.8 earthquake near Erzincan killed some 33,000 people. On a smaller scale, a magnitude-6.0 earthquake in March 2010 in the east took 51 lives.

Chris Rowan, a geologist specializing in tectonics at the University of Chicago, said in a comment for Scientific American that while all of Turkey faces a high risk of earthquakes, the Van region where last week’s tremor was felt has a more complicated geology than in the west. The “mish-mash of lots of smaller faults” makes it hard for scientists to say where the next will occur.

“The stress changes in the region due to this earthquake may interact in complicated and hard-to-predict ways with other faults in the area, and may lead to a heightened chance of further large earthquakes in the months and years ahead,” he said.

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