Unemployment

Unemployment occurs when a person is available to work and seeking work but currently without work. The prevalence of unemployment is usually measured using the unemployment rate, which is defined as the percentage of those in the labor force who are unemployed. The unemployment rate is also used in economic studies and economic indices such as the United States' Conference Board's Index of Leading Indicators as a measure of the state of the macroeconomics.


Most economic schools of thought agree that the cause of involuntary unemployment is that wages are above the market clearing rate. However, there are disagreements as to why this would be the case: the economists argue that in a downturn, wages stay high because they are naturally 'sticky', whilst others argue that minimum wages and union activity keep them high. Keynesian economics emphasizes unemployment resulting from insufficient effective demand for goods and services in the economy (cyclical unemployment). Others point to structural problems, inefficiencies, inherent in labour markets (structural unemployment). Classical or neoclassical economics tends to reject these explanations, and focuses more on rigidities imposed on the labor market from the outside, such as minimum wage laws, taxes, and other regulations that may discourage the hiring of workers (classical unemployment). Yet others see unemployment as largely due to voluntary choices by the unemployed (frictional unemployment). Alternatively, some blame unemployment on Globalisation. There is also disagreement on how exactly to measure unemployment. Different countries experience different levels of unemployment; traditionally, the USA experiences lower unemployment levels than countires in the European Union, although there is variet there, with countries like the UK and Denmark outpreforming Italy and France and it also changes over time (e.g. the Great depression) throughout economic cycles.

Eurovision Song Contest 2009

The Eurovision Song Contest 2009 was the 54th edition of the Eurovision Song Contest. It took place between 12 and 16 May 2009 at the Olympic Indoor Arena in Moscow, Russia.

The contest was won by Norway's Alexander Rybak and his song "Fairytale" which received a record breaking 387 points, the highest total score in Eurovision history.[2] Second place went to Iceland and third to Azerbaijan with Turkey and the United Kingdom finishing fourth and fifth respectively.

2009 Norway - Alexander Rybak (SF 3)
Yükleyen Galiza. - See the latest featured music videos.

Changes in the voting procedure were made with the re-introduction of a national jury alongside televoting while the format of the semi-finals remained the same. Forty-two countries participated in the contest; Slovakia announced that it would return to the contest, while San Marino withdrew due to financial issues. Latvia and Georgia originally announced their intention to withdraw, but it was later stated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) that both countries would indeed participate.[3] However, Georgia later decided to withdraw after the EBU rejected its selected song as being a breach of contest rules.

The Eurovision Song Contest 2009 is broadly considered the 'comeback' of the United Kingdom and France

The History of English

English is a West Germanic language that originated from the Anglo-Frisian and Lower Saxon dialects brought to Britain by Germanic settlers and Roman auxiliary troops from various parts of what is now northwest Germany and the northern Netherlands[citation needed] in the 5th century. One of these Germanic tribes were the Angles, who may have come from Angeln, and Bede wrote that their whole nation came to Britain, leaving their former land empty. The names 'England' (or 'Aenglaland') and English are derived from the name of this tribe.
The Anglo Saxons began invading around 449 AD from the regions of Denmark and Jutland, Before the Anglo-Saxons arrived in England the native population spoke Brythonic, a Celtic language. Although the most significant changes in dialect occurred after the Norman invasion of 1066, the language retained its name and the pre-Norman invasion dialect is now known as Old English.

Initially, Old English was a diverse group of dialects, reflecting the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms of Great Britain.[20] One of these dialects, Late West Saxon, eventually came to dominate. The original Old English language was then influenced by two waves of invasion. The first was by language speakers of the North Germanic branch of the Germanic family; they conquered and colonized parts of the British Isles in the 8th and 9th centuries. The second was the Normans in the 11th century, who spoke Old Norman and developed an English variety of this called Anglo-Norman. (Over the centuries, this lost the specifically Norman element under the influence of Parisian French and, later, of English, eventually turning into a distinctive dialect of Anglo-French.) These two invasions caused English to become "mixed" to some degree (though it was never a truly mixed language in the strict linguistic sense of the word; mixed languages arise from the cohabitation of speakers of different languages, who develop a hybrid tongue for basic communication).

Cohabitation with the Scandinavians resulted in a lexical supplementation of the Anglo-Frisian core of English; the later Norman occupation led to the grafting onto that Germanic core of a more elaborate layer of words from the Romance languages. This Norman influence entered English largely through the courts and government. Thus, English developed into a "borrowing" language of great flexibility and with a huge vocabulary.

The emergence and spread of the British Empire as well as the emergence of the United States as a superpower helped to spread the English language around the world.