Jobless rate drops in NZ
DEMOCRATS MO have won a House majority in the US Congress, gaining power to investigate President Donald Trump and help shape the nation’s political agenda for the next two years.
Democrats picked up at least two dozen House seats, capturing the 218 seats needed to break Republicans’ eightyear hold on the House that began with the tea party revolt of 2010.
While Republicans retained control of the Senate, the Democratic win in the House ends the GOP monopoly on power in Washington and opens a new era of divided government.
Democratic candidates flipped seats in a host of sub- urban districts outside Washington, New York, Philadelphia, Miami, Chicago and Denver, including many that were won by Hillary Clinton in 2016.
The suburban revolt threatens what’s left of the president’s governing agenda, with major questions looming about health care, immigration and government spending.
But the GOP gained ground in the Senate and preserved key governorships, beating back a “blue wave” that never fully materialised.
The mixed verdict in the first nationwide election of Mr Trump’s young presidency underscored the limits of his hardline immigration rhetoric in America’s evolving political landscape, where college-educated voters in the nation’s suburbs rejected his warnings of a migrant “invasion” while blue-collar voters and rural America embraced them.
The president’s party will maintain control of the executive and judicial branches of NEW Zealand’s third quarter unemployment rate has dropped to a surprise 10-year low.
The unemployment rate dropped to 3.9 per cent over the September quarter, well below the 4.4 per cent rate recorded in the last quarter, and is the lowest since the June 2008 quarter, when it was 3.8 per cent.
Economists had forecast an unemployment rate of 4.5 per cent.