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but she is worried that the education she is getting, in a public system that she faults on quality, will not be enough to win her a place in a job market that she says is often skewed by bribery and favoritism.

“Students do not have an equal chance to succeed,” she said, adding that many parents had gone into debt trying to ensure that their children have some chance for a future by paying for them to study in private schools. “The quality of education all depends on the parents’ income.”

about one-third of the country’s civil servants work in the sector.

In his speech he called for mandatory foreign language training in university degree courses and a new emphasis on vocational and technical training.

In the 1980s, a political decision to reclaim the Moroccan identity resulted in a change in the language of instruction, with elementary and high school classes shifting to Arabic. Most higher education programs, however, remained in French.

Mr. Mrabet said other problems included an excessive focus in graduate training on quantity over quality; a failure to adapt courses to workplace opportunities; overcrowded lecture halls; student strikes; and school financing issues.

Instead of hiring graduates of the Moroccan public education system, recruiters tend to look for graduates educated abroad or the products of Moroccan private schools,

“Call centers are the biggest employers in Morocco with about 50,000 jobs that generally require good skills in French,” he said. “In some fields, like I.T., it is difficult to find people with the adequate training.”

Baltimore, which already has a 50-foot channel, has a bottleneck on the land side: the Howard Street tunnel, through which trains have to pass to reach the port, and which is too small to accommodate the double-stacked container cars that are increasingly the standard for rail shipping. The rail line CSX has announced a workaround that could cost hundreds of millions, involving a new yard beyond the tunnel filled with containers brought by truck; the port will load the trains with a single container to get through the tunnel, and the trains can be completed at the yard.

The big ships will also come via places beyond Panama: many are expected to come from Southeast Asia through the Suez Canal, and from South America’s eastern ports.

Big retailers and fashion companies have repeatedly tried and failed to develop alternatives, experimenting in India, Africa and Latin America, only to run into infrastructure bottlenecks and shortages of skilled managers or workers.

India was not organized for large-scale, timely production,

Africa did not have enough workers with the right skills for high-volume labeling and shipping,

and Latin America did not have enough workers interested in operating sewing machines.

What may save Bangladesh from a sharp, immediate drop in export orders is simply that most Southeast Asian factories are already fully booked with orders from multinationals fleeing China’s ever-rising costs.

In Guatemala, the quality was excellent, he said, but, “They can’t handle big orders and they’re slow on delivery.”

Dozens of impoverished countries make T-shirts and other very basic clothing. But only a few countries — really just China, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia and to some extent Cambodia and Pakistan — have developed highly complex systems for producing and shipping tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of identical, high-quality shirts, blouses or trousers to a global retailer within several weeks of receiving an order.

He said that he and a couple of other suppliers of elite retail chains always worried about Bangladesh’s reliance on high-rise factories,

The logs are shipped to a mill in San Leandro, California.

The slats are waxed and kiln dried again.

The cedar logs are cut into small, pencil-length slats less than one-fourth of an inch in thickness. These are kiln dried and then tinted for the same reason women put rouge on their faces.

Don't overlook the ancestors present and distant who have a hand in transporting sixty carloads of slats across the nation.

Once in the pencil factory—$4,000,000 in machinery and building, all capital accumulated by thrifty and saving parents of mine—each slat is given eight grooves by a complex machine, after which another machine lays leads in every other slat, applies glue, and places another slat atop—a lead sandwich, so to speak. Seven brothers and I are mechanically carved from this "wood-clinched" sandwich.

The graphite is mined in Ceylon.

The graphite is mixed with clay from Mississippi in which ammonium hydroxide is used in the refining process. Then wetting agents are added such as sulfonated tallow—animal fats chemically reacted with sulfuric acid. After passing through numerous machines, the mixture finally appears as endless extrusions—as from a sausage grinder-cut to size, dried, and baked for several hours at 1,850 degrees Fahrenheit. To increase their strength and smoothness the leads are then treated with a hot mixture which includes candelilla wax from Mexico, paraffin wax, and hydrogenated natural fats.

My cedar receives six coats of lacquer. Do you know all the ingredients of lacquer? Who would think that the growers of castor beans and the refiners of castor oil are a part of it? They are.

Observe the labeling. That's a film formed by applying heat to carbon black mixed with resins. How do you make resins and what, pray, is carbon black?

My bit of metal—the ferrule—is brass. Think of all the persons who mine zinc and copper and those who have the skills to make shiny sheet brass from these products of nature. Those black rings on my ferrule are black nickel. What is black nickel and how is it applied? The complete story of why the center of my ferrule has no black nickel on it would take pages to explain. RP.18

An ingredient called "factice" is what does the erasing. It is a rubber-like product made by reacting rape-seed oil from the Dutch East Indies with sulfur chloride. Rubber, contrary to the common notion, is only for binding purposes. Then, too, there are numerous vulcanizing and accelerating agents. The pumice comes from Italy; and the pigment which gives "the plug" its color is cadmium sulfide

Actually, millions of human beings have had a hand in my creation, no one of whom even knows more than a very few of the others.

There isn't a single person in all these millions, including the president of the pencil company, who contributes more than a tiny, infinitesimal bit of know-how.

Here is an astounding fact: Neither the worker in the oil field nor the chemist nor the digger of graphite or clay nor any who mans or makes the ships or trains or trucks nor the one who runs the machine that does the knurling on my bit of metal nor the president of the company performs his singular task because he wants me.

There is a fact still more astounding: the absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being. No trace of such a person can be found.

For, if one is aware that these know-hows will naturally, yes, automatically, arrange themselves into creative and productive patterns in response to human necessity and demand—that is, in the absence of governmental or any other coercive masterminding—then one will possess an absolutely essential ingredient for freedom: a faith in free people. Freedom is impossible without this faith.

Today renewable energy supplies only about 6 percent of American demand. And most of that comes from water flowing through dams. Solar energy contributes next to nothing.

The arithmetic is merciless. To make it likely that the world’s temperature will rise no more than 2 degrees Celsius above the average of the preindustrial era — a target agreed to by the world’s governments in 2010 — humanity must spew no more than 900 billion more tons of carbon dioxide into the air from now through 2050 and only 75 billion tons after that, according to an authoritative new study in Britain.

The United States Energy Information Administration forecasts that global energy consumption will grow 56 percent between now and 2040.

The only way around this is to put something in coal’s place, at a reasonably competitive price. Neither the warm glow of the sun nor the restless power of the wind is going to do the trick, at least not soon enough to make a difference in the battle to prevent climate change.

But no place has benefited to the extent of Tennessee, which counts more than 60,000 jobs related to automobile and parts production.

“Humans are by nature creative beings, but not by nature logical, structured-thinking beings. Those are skills you have to learn. One of the things that makes people more effective is if you can do both. ... If you’re great on both attributes, you’ll have a lot more options

“Ten years ago behavioral economics was rarely referenced. But [then] you apply social science to economics and suddenly there’s this whole new field. I think a lot about how the most interesting things are happening at the intersection of two fields. To pursue that, you need expertise in both fields.

“What you want to do is say: ‘Here’s the attribute I’m going to demonstrate; here’s the story demonstrating it; here’s how that story demonstrated that attribute.’ ” And here is how it can create value.

Russia accounts for 13 percent of Ukraine's iron and steel exports, and the political crisis has already hit shipments from Ukrainian steelmakers this year.

Sales of rebar - a steel bar or mesh of steel wires used in reinforced concrete - to the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), a bloc of former Soviet states, fell 70 percent to 45,000 tonnes in January compared with the average monthly export figure in the first half of 2013.Russian steelmakers have aggressively lobbied their government to implement measures to defend domestic producers from Ukrainian imports.

Tough competition on the international steel market makes the chance of (steelmakers) expanding their export market presence very low," Eavex Capital metals analyst Ivan Dzvinka said in Kiev

Manufacturers of train carts and turbo engines, which together account for 2.5 percent of Ukraine's total exports, will be hit particularly hard.

"Re-orienting these industries to Europe would be nearly impossible without very heavy investment,

"The point of the FTA is not to make it possible for Ukraine to export Soviet-era tractors to Europe. That's not going to happen. But it could eventually lead to Ukraine becoming a producer of Peugeots, Volkswagens, fridges or Nokia telephones," the EUISS's Popescu said.

But, as inevitable as simplification is for explanation, it is also a trap

Unfortunately, economists and other social scientists get virtually no training in how to choose among alternative models. Neither is such an aptitude professionally rewarded. Developing new theories and empirical tests is regarded as science, while the exercise of good judgment is clearly a craft.

Taking another page from the German system — this time, its apprenticeship program — training should include both internships and postgraduate job placements.

Once workers go on the Disability Insurance rolls, it has proved very hard to get them off; all the while, their skills and contacts in the workplace atrophy. In the fiscal year 2013, the program is estimated to have cost a record $144 billion.

In South Carolina, apprenticeships are mainly funded by employers, but the state introduced a four-year, annual tax credit of $1,000 per position in 2007 that proved to be a boon for small- to medium-size companies.

“The European influence is huge,”