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hope behind the policy is that numerical targets will lift some of the mystery surrounding the Fed's decisions.

As economic data is released, the public can base their expectations for Fed policy on a clearer picture of the central bank's goals.

"I support this approach because it would enable the public to immediately adjust its expectations concerning the timing of liftoff in response to new information affecting the economic outloo

The Fed has kept interest rates near zero since late 2008 in an effort to stimulate the economy. While the unemployment rate has since fallen slightly to 7.9%, the Fed is still unsatisfied with that level and has been pursuing additional alternative policies to boost the economy further.

The Fed's policymaking committee is next scheduled to meet Dec. 11-12.

the American marijuana business brings in about $2 billion a year to Mexico’s drug traffickers.

That makes it almost as important to their business as the cocaine trade, which is worth about $2.4 billion.

Many Mexicans therefore wonder if America might consider a new approach. Felipe Calderon, the president, has said that if Americans cannot bring themselves to stop buying drugs, they ought to consider “market alternatives”, by which he means legalisation. Vicente Fox and Ernesto Zedillo, the two previous presidents of Mexico, have reached the same conclusion.

About 60,000 have been killed by organised crime during the past six years. Thousands more have disappeared.

In Mexico relatively few people take drugs. But many are murdered as a result of the export business.

Would Mexico’s bandits find themselves undercut by “El Cártel de Seattle”?

So smuggling legal Washington dope to New York, for instance, would add about $1,900 to the cost of a kilo, giving a total wholesale price not much below $4,000.

That would make it more expensive than imported Mexican pot. But home-grown marijuana is much better quality than the Mexican sort. The content of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the part that gives you the giggles, is between 10% and 18%, whereas in Mexican pot it is only about 4% to 6%.

It calculates that the cost of growing marijuana legally is about $880 per kilo. Adding on a decent mark-up, plus the taxes that would be applied, it puts the wholesale price of Washington marijuana at just over $2,000 per kilo.

Legalisation could, in short, deal a blow to Mexico’s traffickers of a magnitude that no current policy has got close to achieving. The stoned and sober alike should bear that in mind when they cast their votes on Tuesday.

taken in the Tazreen Fashions factory surfaced in the days following the fire. The retailer responded by saying that the factory was no longer authorized to produce merchandise for it.

"A supplier subcontracted work to this factory without authorization and in direct violation of our policies. Today, we have terminated the relationship with that supplier," Wal-Mart said.

Workers rights experts, however, claim that it's unlikely that retailers wouldn't know where their stuff is produced, as a matter of cost and production control.

"In order to be profitable, you have to control the supply chain, monitor quality, prices and the speed of delivery,

"It's strange that a company would say they had no idea who was making stuff for them."

The audits, completed by what it calls accredited or internationally recognized auditing firms, are carried out every six to 24 months. But the reports are not published online. Nor are they shown to factory workers, according to Nova. "There's no transparency. They never publish their findings as to whether or not there's a violation, so there's not much scrutiny about the audits," he said.

n order to keep production prices low, Nova said that companies rely on cheap labor, which often goes hand-in-hand with low wages, poor working conditions and safety concerns.

"It is such a poor country and so desperate for jobs that they ignore the most minimal labor rights standard," he said. "It's as if everything has to give way just to maintain these garment jobs. There's a fear that the labels will flee and go to another country.

Bangladesh's ready-made garments make up 80% of the country's $24 billion in annual exports, and the country has about 4,500 garment factories that make clothes for large global stores including