Posted by Elena del Valle on July 27, 2021
Latest OECD employment and unemployment numbers – click to enlarge
Graphic: OECD
According to an embargoed press release from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the OECD area employment rate rose to 66.8 percent in the first quarter of 2021 from 66.7 percent in the previous quarter; wide disparities across countries are visible. The organization defined OECD area employment rate as the share of the working-age population with jobs.
In the first quarter of this year in the United States employment was 68.4 percent compared to 66.9 percent in the euro area, and 77.6 percent in Japan. It is notable that the Netherlands had a 79.3 percent employment rate, the highest in the region, and Greece 59.9 percent, the region’s minimum.
The press release clarified the following: Methodological changes to the European Union (E.U.) Labour Force Survey blur the comparison between the fourth quarter of 2020 and the first quarter of 2021 for EU countries. In addition, a large part of the increase in the third and, to a lesser extent, fourth quarter of 2020 reflects the return to work of furloughed workers in Canada and the United States, where they are recorded as unemployed, whereas in most other countries, they are recorded as employed.
Working with over 100 countries, the OECD is “a global policy forum that promotes policies to preserve individual liberty and improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world.”
Posted by Elena del Valle on July 21, 2021
Inspector Rex
Photo: Mhz Choice
The first season of Inspector Rex (Kommissar Rex) in German with English subtitles is available on Mhz Choice, a subscription streaming service with mostly European programming. After Rex, a police dog, loses his partner in the line of duty he becomes despondent, refusing to eat or drink anything. Seeing the dog’s situation a recently divorced cop adopts him.
An all male cast, staring Tobias Moretti as Richard Moser and Karl Markovics as Ernst Stockinger as well as Gerhard Zemann and Wolf Bachofner, solve crimes in and around Vienna in the 1994 series. Each episode is 45 minutes long. According to IMDB.com the series ended in 2004. The website lists Reginald von Ravenhorst, born in 1991 in Bavaria, Germany and died in 2003 in Germany, as Rex.
Posted by Elena del Valle on July 12, 2021
Filmmaker Karla Legaspy
Photo: Betsy Martinez
A podcast interview with filmmaker Karla Legaspy is available in the Podcast Section of Hispanic Marketing and Public Relations, HispanicMPR.com. She discusses her short film The Daily War with Elena del Valle, host of the HispanicMPR.com podcast.
Karla is a Los Angeles based director and producer. She is a Two-Spirit MeXicana content creator, actor and film programmer. She is the writer, director and producer of the short film Gold Star, winner of the Latino Public Broadcasting New Media Grant and the 2016 People’s Choice Award for the PBS Short Film Festival. Karla co-produced AdeRisa Productions feature film Bruising for Besos about domestic violence in a lesbian community.
To listen to the interview, scroll down and click on the play button below. You can listen by looking for “Podcast” then select “HMPR Karla Legaspy” and download the MP3 file to your audio player. You can also find it on the RSS feed. To download it, click on the arrow of the recording you wish to copy and save it to disk. The podcast will remain listed in the July 2021 section of the podcast archive.
