Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/297040154?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Saturday, April 6, 2013
Dim labor report shows US added just 88K jobs
WASHINGTON (AP) ? A streak of robust job growth came to a halt in March, signaling that U.S. employers may have grown cautious in a fragile economy.
The gain of 88,000 jobs was the smallest in nine months. Even a decline in unemployment to a four-year low of 7.6 percent was nothing to cheer: It fell only because more people stopped looking for work and were no longer counted as unemployed.
Friday's weak jobs report from the Labor Department caught analysts by surprise and served as a reminder that the economic recovery is still slow, nearly four years after the Great Recession ended.
"This is not a good report through and through," Dan Greenhaus, chief economic strategist at brokerage firm BTIG, said in a note to clients.
Economists had no single explanation for why hiring weakened so sharply and broadly ? from retailers and manufacturers to electronics and building materials companies. Some said deep government spending cuts that began taking effect March 1 might have contributed to the slowdown, along with higher Social Security taxes. Others raised the possibility that last month was just a pause in an improving job market.
Whatever the reasons, slower job growth will extend the Federal Reserve's policy of keeping borrowing costs at record lows.
March's job gain was less than half the average of 196,000 jobs in the previous six months, raising the prospect that for the fourth straight spring, the economy and hiring could show strength early in the year, only to weaken later. Some economists say weak hiring may persist into summer before rebounding by fall.
The percentage of working-age Americans with a job or looking for one fell to 63.3 percent in March, the lowest such figure in nearly 34 years.
Stocks plummeted after the report but narrowed their losses later in the day. The Dow Jones industrial average closed down about 41 points. Broader indexes also declined.
The Labor Department uses a survey of mostly large businesses and government agencies to determine how many jobs are added or lost each month. That's the survey that produced the gain of 88,000 jobs for March.
The government uses a separate survey of households to calculate the unemployment rate. It counted 290,000 fewer people as unemployed ? not because they found a job but because they stopped looking for one.
The percentage of working-age adults with a job or looking for one is a figure that economists call the participation rate. It's the lowest since 1979. Normally during an economic recovery, an expanding economy lures job seekers back into the labor market. But this time, many have stayed on the sidelines, and more have joined them.
Longer-term trends have helped keep the participation rate down. The baby boomers have begun to retire. The share of men 20 and older in the labor force has dropped as manufacturing has shrunk.
After expanding from the early 1950s through the mid-1990s, the share of women working or looking for work has plateaued. Fewer teenagers are working. And some people who have left the job market are getting by on government aid, particularly Social Security's program for the disabled.
Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, said the labor force participation among those ages 25 to 54 ? "prime age" workers ? has dropped to 81.1 percent. It hasn't been lower since 1984.
Gary Burtless, senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, noted that some Americans have likely stopped looking for work because their unemployment benefits have run out. People must be looking for a job to qualify for unemployment benefits.
"If people aren't collecting benefits, they have one less reason to be out pounding the pavement looking for a job," Burtless said.
If the economy slows this spring, it would follow the pattern of recent years.
An intensifying European financial crisis depressed hiring in 2010. Japan's earthquake and tsunami also disrupted U.S. manufacturing in 2011. Last year, an unusually warm winter caused employers to do more hiring early in the year, cutting into hiring that normally happens in spring.
This year's steep government spending cuts could have the same effect. But some economists say they expect any weakening this spring to be milder. The economy has a stronger foundation now. Rising home prices and near-record-level stock prices are making consumers feel wealthier and spend more.
"The recovery is on much better footing this year than in the last few springs, and the recovery in the housing market will do much to support growth," said Sophia Koropeckyj, an economist at Moody's Analytics.
Economists also cautioned against reading too much into a one-month slowdown in hiring.
Friday's report also showed hiring was stronger in January and February than previously estimated. January job growth was revised up from 119,000 to 148,000. February was revised from 236,000 to 268,000.
Those revised totals suggest that some hiring might have again occurred earlier in the year than usual. Job gains have averaged 168,000 in the past three months, close to the trend of the past two years.
The Fed has said it plans to keep short-term interest rates at record lows at least until unemployment falls to 6.5 percent ? and Chairman Ben Bernanke has said a 6.5 percent rate is a threshold, not a "trigger," for any rate increase. The Fed wants to see sustained improvement in the job market.
Several industries cut back sharply on hiring. Retailers cut 24,000 jobs, manufacturers 3,000 jobs.
Some economists said retailers might have held back on hiring in part because March was colder than normal. That likely meant that Americans bought fewer spring clothes and less garden equipment.
Fred Whyte, president of Stihl Inc., which makes chainsaws, lawn trimmers and other equipment, said the Virginia Beach, Va.-based company has benefited from the housing recovery and is looking to fill about 130 jobs, including engineers, machinists and software programmers.
With home sales rising, more people are willing to spend money to spruce up their yards, Whyte said. Commercial developers are spending more on landscaping.
But Whyte said the company has heard complaints from retailers that cold weather in March was holding down sales.
The oil and gas industry has been adding jobs fast over the past several years but cut jobs in March for the first time in 2? years. Oil drilling and exploration is booming, but low natural gas prices over the last year have made natural gas drilling in some areas unprofitable.
In March, average hourly pay rose a penny, the smallest gain in five months. Average pay is just 1.8 percent higher than a year earlier, trailing the pace of inflation, which rose 2 percent in the past 12 months.
Most analysts think the economy strengthened from January through March, helped by the pickup in hiring, a sustained housing recovery and steady consumer spending. Consumers stepped up purchases in January and February, even after Social Security taxes rose this year.
At the same time, some small businesses say they've grown more cautious about hiring. The government spending cuts could cut into sales at companies with federal contracts and at small retailers located near government facilities. And small business owners worry about increased health insurance costs next year, when the government's health care overhaul is fully implemented.
As federal agencies and contractors cut back in coming months, Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at IHS Global Insight, expects job growth to average 100,000 to 150,000 a month, down from an average 212,000 from December through February. He expects hiring to pick up after mid-year.
"The good news," Behravesh said, "is that this is happening at a time when the private economy is gaining momentum."
___
AP Business Writers Jonathan Fahey and Joyce M. Rosenberg in New York contributed to this report.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/dim-labor-report-shows-us-added-just-88k-220308863--finance.html
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Pope Francis wants Church to "act decisively" against sex abuse
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Francis wants the Catholic Church to "act decisively" to root out sexual abuse of children by priests and ensure that the perpetrators undergo due process, the Vatican said on Friday.
Officials said that Francis, in a meeting with Holy See doctrinal chief Archbishop Gerhard Muller, had declared that combating sexual abuse was important "for the Church and its credibility".
 |
Pope Francis gestures as he speaks during a weekly general audience in Saint Peter's Basilica, at the Vatican April 3, 2013. REUTERS/Stefano Rellandini |
Francis inherited a Church mired in problems and a major scandal over priestly abuse of children.
(Reporting By Philip Pullella; editing by Barry Moody)
Copyright ? 2013 Reuters
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Ice That Took 1,600 Years to Form in Peru?s Andes Melted in Only 25, Scientists Say
[unable to retrieve full-text content]Scientists say the rapid melting of the Quelccaya ice cap, the world?s largest tropical ice sheet, is the latest sign of global warming.
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Friday, April 5, 2013
INSIDE HIGH SCHOOL SPORTS WITH STEVE MARSHALL (4-4-13)
Posted by COX HS HUB STAFF on 04/04/2013
This week on Inside High School Sports with Steve Marshall focuses on the defending 6A State Champs, Edmond North Baseball as they travel to Florida. Highlights of some of the top boys soccer teams from last week's Bronco Cup. Also an inside look at the Dibartolo Sports University Elite QB Camp with highlights of some of the state top QB's and an interview with former OU assistant Joe Dickinson.?
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INSIDE HIGH SCHOOL SPORTS-APRIL 4TH from Inside High School Sports on Vimeo.
Source: http://www.coxhshub.com/quick-news/m.blog/43/inside-high-school-sports-with-steve-marshall-4-4-13
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Thursday, April 4, 2013
Invasive crabs help Cape Cod marshes
Apr. 3, 2013 ? Ecologists are wary of non-native species, but along the shores of Cape Cod where grass-eating crabs have been running amok and destroying the marsh, an invasion of a predatory green crabs has helped turn back the tide in favor of the grass. The counter-intuitive conclusions appear in a new paper in the journal Ecology.
Long vilified, invasive species can sometimes become an ecosystem asset. New Brown University research published online in the journal Ecology reports exactly such a situation in the distressed salt marshes of Cape Cod. There, the invasive green crab Carcinus maenas is helping to restore the marsh by driving away the Sesarma reticulatum crabs that have been depleting the marsh grasses.
The observations and experiments of the research show that the green crab has filled the void left by the decline of native predators of sesarma crabs, the authors said. In previous research they showed that predator decline has come about because of recreational fishing.
"Humans have had far-reaching impacts on ecosystems," said author Tyler Coverdale, a researcher in the lab of lead author Mark Bertness, chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. "Some of those impacts, like overfishing, cause species to decline in their native ranges. Others, like shipping and trade, cause species to become more common outside of their native ranges. Most of the time these opposing types of impacts have negative results. In this case, an invasive species is potentially restoring a lost ecological function."
Bertness and his group have been working on the marshes for years to trace the extent and cause of the damage, which includes grass die-offs and subsequent erosion. A few years ago, they started noticing that where there was still soil, grasses were sometimes growing back somewhat, although far short of full recovery.
"When we started seeing the marshes recover, we were baffled," Bertness said. "To see very quickly the marshes start to come back, at least this veneer of cordgrass, it seemed pretty impressive. When we started seeing this recovery we started seeing loads of green crabs at the marshes that were recovering. We went out and quantified that."
Crab vs. Crab
The most elementary finding of the paper is that the green crabs are much more abundant (as many as 2.8 green crabs per square meter) in distressed-but-healing marsh areas where can they take over sesarma burrows. In healthy marsh areas with few sesarma burrows, the green crabs found no quarter (there were only 0.2 per square meter).
Bertness and Coverdale's measurements of cordgrass regrowth also showed that locations with high green crab density correlated positively with locations of grass regrowth.
The next steps were experiments to test whether all this was a mere coincidence of coexistence or whether there was a dynamic between the green crabs and the sesarma crabs that would plausibly defend the grass.
At select sites, Bertness and Coverdale enclosed the two crabs together within a wire cage at a burrow. After a set period of time they came back to observe the results and always found the same story. Green crabs won the struggle for the burrows. In fact sesarma crabs survived the tussle only 15 percent of the time. As a control they caged in other sesarma crabs without green crabs, and those sesarma crabs always survived.
Finally they tested whether green crabs had to eat the sesarma crabs to protect the grass or whether their mere presence had a deterrent effect. They did this by fencing in some sesarma crabs by themselves, some with a free roaming green crab (a clear and present danger) and some with a caged green crab (physically harmless but still plainly evident).
Sesarma left alone ate lots of grass in their fenced in area. Sesarma who faced a free-roaming or a caged green crab both ate far less grass. In other words, the presence of a green crab was as effective a deterrent to sesarma herbivory as actual attacks by green crabs.
Bertness likened the green crabs to scarecrows, which model what ecologists have recently begun to account for as "non-consumptive effects." Lay people already call that effect "scaring things away."
"Non-consumptive effects can be much more powerful because whereas a consumptive effect is one crab eats another crab, a non-consumptive effect is one crab scares dozens of crabs," Bertness said. "The ecological effect can be much greater much quicker."
In two ways, therefore, the new study provides evidence for two newer views in ecology, Bertness said. One is that invasive species can sometimes turn out to be helpful. The other is that ecologists should account for the power of a predator's threat, not just its actual attacks.
As for the marshes, however, Bertness said they need more help than the green crab alone can deliver.
"The marshes are slowly coming back but they were destroyed much faster than they are going to be able to rebuild," he said.
The National Science Foundation funded the research (grant OCE-0927090).
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Brown University.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
- Mark D. Bertness, Tyler Clarke Coverdale. An invasive species facilitates the recovery of salt marsh ecosystems on Cape Cod. Ecology, 2013; : 130402142357000 DOI: 10.1890/12-2150.1
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
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