Suchergebnisse

This report describes recent policy changes made by FHA and recent legislative proposals that would make additional changes to FHA's single-family program. For the most part, this report does not go into detail about the features of FHA-insured loans, FHA's market role, or its financial status, except as necessary to describe implemented or proposed policy changes.

This report briefly describes the structure and eligible uses of the Housing Trust Fund as authorized in P.L. 110-289.

This report begins with a brief overview of FHA's current role in the mortgage market. It also describes the financial status of the insurance fund that finances FHA-insured single-family mortgages, known as the Mutual Mortgage Insurance Fund, including its treatment in the federal budget and measures of its actuarial soundness.

This report describes the Housing Trust Fund and discusses potential funding sources.

Abstract
The house of Dior is one of the most successful fashion brands in the world. However, after the sudden death of Christian Dior, in 1957 there was a question as to whether the brand could survive without its founder at the helm. The longevity and success of historic fashion houses has been, in many ways, dependent on finding a head designer capable of carrying on both the legacy and the continued financial success of the brand. Since so much emphasis is placed on the identity and credentials of the head designer of a fashion label, the hiring process is frequently a public affair. As gatekeepers to the fashion world, the media keeps interested parties abreast of the proceedings and subsequent results of the hiring process. A study of the news discourse concerning the search for, announcement, and evaluation of new designer appointments at historically established fashion houses was undertaken to explore the framing of these events in the media. Christian Dior was purposefully selected for this study due to its longevity and the level of media interest in the seven different designers that have held the top design position at the storied house. The New York Times was selected as the site of research due to its history of providing readers with coverage of the international fashion scene in both general interest news categories and its dedicated style sections. A critical discourse analysis of 73 articles utilized iterative, comparative and reflective readings of text to reveal both the socially constructed and the socially constructing elements. The study explores the discursive practices employed by the popular fashion press to report, analyse and validate new designer/artistic director appointments at established fashion houses. How the discourse situated these processes within the larger context and history of the house is also discussed.

This book offers a striking and pointed reflection on what histories of masculinity in modern Britain have been and where they might go next. Addressing the constant contemporary talk of crisis around men's lives, Men and Masculinities argues powerfully that we need histories of masculinity which are present-centred and politically engaged. In so doing, it sets out a new agenda for the field. Ranging over the past 130 years, a series of engaging and original essays trace how men, like masculinity, were made. In exploring that process, contributors demonstrate the radically different ways in which men made sense of the world and their place in it. The book provides compelling evidence of how individual life stories can transform how we think about the time- and place-specific formation of men's experiences and ideas of masculinity. Through vivid case studies that include trans men's encounters with the welfare state, the experience of wounded Jamaican servicemen, and the social world of the public librarian, the volume interweaves histories of masculinity with wider histories of society, culture, economy, and politics. It is on that basis that the work shows how thinking critically about histories of masculinity also provides new ways of understanding the making and remaking of modern Britain. Men and Masculinities both provides a critical genealogy for contemporary gender politics and the persistence of patriarchy and male power and establishes new ways of understanding how men's lives and ideas of masculinity have (and have not) changed in modern Britain.

The 113th Congress has seen several developments in the effort to reform the housing finance system. In the House, the Protecting American Taxpayers and Homeowners Act of 2013 (PATH Act; H.R. 2767) was ordered to be reported out of the House Financial Services Committee on July 24, 2013. This report will briefly explain the different approaches to housing finance reform offered by these legislative proposals, focusing on efforts to replace Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and reform FHA. The report does not describe every provision of the proposals but discusses major concepts and themes.

Tens of thousands of landslides were generated over 10,000 km2 of North Canterbury and Marlborough as a consequence of the 14 November 2016, Mw7.8 Kaikōura Earthquake. The most intense landslide damage was concentrated in 3500 km2 around the areas of fault rupture. Given the sparsely populated area affected by landslides, only a few homes were impacted and there were no recorded deaths due to landslides. Landslides caused major disruption with all road and rail links with Kaikōura being severed. The landslides affecting State Highway 1 (the main road link in the South Island of New Zealand) and the South Island main trunk railway extended from Ward in Marlborough all the way to the south of Oaro in North Canterbury. The majority of landslides occurred in two geological and geotechnically distinct materials reflective of the dominant rock types in the affected area. In the Neogene sedimentary rocks (sandstones, limestones and siltstones) of the Hurunui District, North Canterbury and around Cape Campbell in Marlborough, first-time and reactivated rock-slides and rock-block slides were the dominant landslide type. These rocks also tend to have rock material strength values in the range of 5-20 MPa. In the Torlesse 'basement' rocks (greywacke sandstones and argillite) of the Kaikōura Ranges, first-time rock and debris avalanches were the dominant landslide type. These rocks tend to have material strength values in the range of 20-50 MPa. A feature of this earthquake is the large number (more than 200) of valley blocking landslides it generated. This was partly due to the steep and confined slopes in the area and the widely distributed strong ground shaking. The largest landslide dam has an approximate volume of 12(±2) M m3 and the debris from this travelled about 2.7 km2 downslope where it formed a dam blocking the Hapuku River. The long-term stability of cracked slopes and landslide dams from future strong earthquakes and large rainstorms are an ongoing concern to central and local government agencies responsible for rebuilding homes and infrastructure. A particular concern is the potential for debris floods to affect downstream assets and infrastructure should some of the landslide dams breach catastrophically. At least twenty-one faults ruptured to the ground surface or sea floor, with these surface ruptures extending from the Emu Plain in North Canterbury to offshore of Cape Campbell in Marlborough. The mapped landslide distribution reflects the complexity of the earthquake rupture. Landslides are distributed across a broad area of intense ground shaking reflective of the elongate area affected by fault rupture, and are not clustered around the earthquake epicentre. The largest landslides triggered by the earthquake are located either on or adjacent to faults that ruptured to the ground surface. Surface faults may provide a plane of weakness or hydrological discontinuity and adversely oriented surface faults may be indicative of the location of future large landslides. Their location appears to have a strong structural geological control. Initial results from our landslide investigations suggest predictive models relying only on ground-shaking estimates underestimate the number and size of the largest landslides that occurred.