Unemployment fell in February in 22 US states

WASHINGTON (AP) ? Unemployment rates fell in 22 U.S. states in February from January, a sign that hiring gains are benefiting many parts of the country.

The Labor Department said Friday that unemployment rates rose in 12 states and were unchanged in 16.

Nationally, the unemployment rate slid to a four-year low of 7.7 percent in February, down from 7.9 percent in January. Since November, employers across the country have added an average of 200,000 jobs a month, nearly double the average from last spring.

States hit hardest during the recession are showing improvement.

In Nevada, unemployment dropped to 9.6 percent last month, down from 11.8 percent a year ago. That's the biggest year-over-year decrease among states.

One reason for the big drop is that people have stopped applying for jobs. Nevada's work force ? those working or looking for work ? fell nearly 1 percent in the year through February. Only those looking for work are counted as unemployed. But hiring accelerated, too: Jobs in Nevada rose 2 percent over the past year.

Unemployment in California fell to 9.6 percent last month, down from 10.8 percent in February 2012.

California and Nevada are still tied with Mississippi for the nation's highest unemployment rate.

Florida's job market has also rebounded in the past year. The Sunshine State's unemployment rate fell to 7.7 percent in February, down from 9 percent a year earlier.

North Dakota once again held the nation's lowest unemployment rate, at 3.3 percent. The state is benefiting from a boom in oil and natural gas production. Nebraska had the second-lowest rate, at 3.8 percent.

Overall, 42 states added jobs in February from January, and just eight lost jobs. The biggest monthly job gains came in Texas (up nearly 81,000) and California (up more than 41,000).

In the 12 months up to February, Texas gained nearly 294,000 jobs, and California 128,000. On a percentage basis, North Dakota reported the fastest job growth over the past year, rising 5 percent.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/f70471f764144b2fab526d39972d37b3/Article_2013-03-29-US-State-Unemployment/id-fcaf58299a1542dcbac9403ccb81c10a

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NeNe Leakes-Kim Zolciak Feud: It's Over!

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2013/03/nene-leakes-kim-zolciak-feud-its-over/

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States answer help wanted ad to be drone test site

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- It's the land where Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier, where the space shuttle fleet rolled off the assembly line and where the first private manned rocketship climbed to space.

Capitalizing on Southern California's aerospace fortunes, two rival groups want to add another laurel: drone test range.

They face crowded competition. In search of an economic boost, more than half the country is looking toward the sky ? expected to be buzzing in the near future with pilotless aircraft.

Before that can become reality, the Federal Aviation Administration last month put out a call to test fly drones at half a dozen to-be-determined sites before they can share the same space as commercial jetliners, small aircraft and helicopters.

Fifty teams from 37 states answered, vying to win bragging rights as a hub for unmanned aerial vehicles.

The military has long flown drones overseas to support troops, spy on enemies and fire missiles. There's a recent clamor to fly them domestically to track the health of crops, fight wildfires in remote terrain, conduct search and rescue after a disaster and perform other chores considered too "dirty, dull or dangerous" for pilots. The expanding use for drones comes amid concerns of a "Big Brother" society.

The untapped civilian market ? estimated to be worth billions ? has created a face-off, with states perfecting their pitch ? ample restricted airspace, industry connections, academic partners ? not unlike what you might read in a tourism brochure.

"It's the chance to get in on the ground floor of what may be the next big business," said Peter Singer, a robotics expert at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington. "The states competing hope it might make them the robotics equivalent of Detroit for automobiles in the 20th century or Silicon Valley for computers."

Winners will play key roles in helping the government seamlessly transition drones, which are controlled remotely by joystick, into the civilian airspace without crashing into other planes or injuring bystanders.

Supporters of a Southern California test site point to an existing drone presence. General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc., based in the San Diego suburbs, makes the Predator that has circled over Iraq and Afghanistan. Just outside of downtown Los Angeles, AeroVironment introduced the world's first hummingbird spy plane and is developing other tiny drones inspired by biology.

"From start to finish, you can do your UAV work here," said John Rose of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, which co-sponsored a three-day drone conference this week in the Los Angeles area focused on civilian uses.

There are two competing California bids from airport agencies in Ventura County northwest of Los Angeles and Kern County in the Mojave Desert.

"If we are successful, it would be an economic stimulus for the region moving forward," said Bill Buratto of the Ventura County Economic Development Association, which is working with county airport officials on a plan to have drones fly from Point Mugu, the site of numerous Navy training exercises.

Their in-state competitor envisions test flights out of the high desert skies about 150 miles north of Los Angeles and touts its remoteness and access to military and civilian facilities currently doing drone research.

"You kind of want to be in the middle of nowhere. You don't want to risk being close to a populated area," said Eileen Shibley, who leads the effort for the Indian Wells Valley Airport District.

Other states have taken a different tact, putting on a united front or partnering with a neighboring state to pool resources.

Ohio ? the home state of Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong, Mercury astronaut John Glenn and the Wright brothers ? teamed with Indiana to increase both states' odds. Like California, there is budding drone activity in Ohio, most notably the Air Force's sensor research at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

Joseph Zeis of the Dayton Development Coalition doesn't see this as a competition.

"When the test site selection is over, we're all collaborating on a single goal" to safely merge drones into the national airspace, said Zeis, who's spearheading the Ohio-Indiana venture.

The FAA is expected to choose the six drone test sites by year's end.

The specter of thousands of unmanned eyes swarming the sky in the coming years has unnerved privacy advocates, who fear ordinary Americans would be overzealously monitored by law enforcement, considered one of the top users of the technology in the future. As part of the selection process, test site hopefuls must publish a privacy policy and follow existing privacy laws.

The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International does not have a favorite. But the voice for the domestic drone industry acknowledged that states hosting test sites would benefit economically.

In a report published earlier this month, the group said states with an already solid aerospace industry are predicted to gain drone business. But other factors, including location of test sites, will also drive job creation.

That's why California needs to act fast, said state assemblyman Jeff Gorell, who has been pushing for a test site in his district.

"This is a great opportunity for California," he said. "We might be able to recapture some of the golden era of aerospace."

___

Follow Alicia Chang at http://twitter.com/SciWriAlicia

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/states-answer-help-wanted-ad-132616936.html

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Record-breaking cyberattack hits anti-spam group

LONDON (AP) ? A record-breaking cyberattack targeting an anti-spam watchdog group has sent ripples of disruption coursing across the Web, experts said Wednesday.

Spamhaus, a site responsible for keeping ads for counterfeit Viagra and bogus weight-loss pills out of the world's inboxes, said it had been buffeted by the monster denial-of-service attack since mid-March, apparently from groups angry at being blacklisted by the Swiss-British group.

"It is a small miracle that we're still online," Spamhaus researcher Vincent Hanna said.

Denial-of-service attacks overwhelm a server with traffic ? like hundreds of letters being jammed through a mail slot at the same time. Security experts measure those attacks in bits of data per second. Recent cyberattacks ? like the ones that caused persistent outages at U.S. banking sites late last year ? have tended to peak at 100 billion bits per second.

But the furious assault on Spamhaus has shattered the charts, clocking in at 300 billion bits per second, according to San Francisco-based CloudFlare Inc., which Spamhaus has enlisted to help it weather the attack.

"It was likely quite a bit more, but at some point measurement systems can't keep up," CloudFlare chief executive Matthew Prince wrote in an email.

Patrick Gilmore of Akamai Technologies said that was no understatement.

"This attack is the largest that has been publicly disclosed ? ever ? in the history of the Internet," he said.

It's unclear who exactly was behind the attack, although a man who identified himself as Sven Olaf Kamphuis said he was in touch with the attackers and described them as mainly consisting of disgruntled Russian Internet service providers who had found themselves on Spamhaus' blacklists. There was no immediate way to verify his claim.

He accused the watchdog of arbitrarily blocking content that it did not like. Spamhaus has widely used and constantly updated blacklists of sites that send spam.

"They abuse their position not to stop spam but to exercise censorship without a court order," Kamphuis said.

Gilmore and Prince said the attack's perpetrators had taken advantage of weaknesses in the Internet's infrastructure to trick thousands of servers into routing a torrent of junk traffic to Spamhaus every second.

The trick, called "DNS reflection," works a little bit like mailing requests for information to thousands of different organizations with a target's return address written across the back of the envelopes. When all the organizations reply at once, they send a landslide of useless data to the unwitting addressee.

Both experts said the attack's sheer size has sent ripples of disruptions across the Internet as servers moved mountains of junk traffic back and forth across the Web.

"At a minimum there would have been slowness," Prince said, adding in a blog post that "if the Internet felt a bit more sluggish for you over the last few days in Europe, this may be part of the reason why."

At the London Internet Exchange, where service providers exchange traffic across the globe, spokesman Malcolm Hutty said his organization had seen "a minor degree of congestion in a small portion of the network."

But he said it was unlikely that any ordinary users had been affected by the attack.

Hanna said his site had so far managed to stay online, but warned that being knocked off the Internet could give spammers an opening to step up their mailings ? which may mean more fake lottery announcements and pitches for penny stocks heading to people's inboxes.

Hanna denied claims that his organization had behaved arbitrarily, noting that his group would lose its credibility if it started flagging benign content as spam.

"We have 1.7 billion people who watch over our shoulder," he said. "If we start blocking emails that they want, they will obviously stop using us."

Gilmore of Akamai was also dismissive of the claim that Spamhaus was biased.

"Spamhaus' reputation is sterling," he said.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/record-breaking-cyberattack-hits-anti-spam-group-191306006--finance.html

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Police reports in Tucson shooting rampage released

PHOENIX (AP) ? Hundreds of pages of police reports in the investigation of the Tucson shooting rampage that wounded former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords are being released Wednesday, marking the public's first glimpse into documents that authorities have kept private since the attack more than two years ago.

The Pima County sheriff's department will release an estimated 2,700 pages of records from the January 2011 shooting at a meet-and-greet event outside a grocery store that killed six people and wounded Giffords and 11 others. The documents include transcribed interviews with witnesses, various police reports and other records, and could provide new insight into how the shooting occurred.

News organizations seeking the records were repeatedly denied the documents in the months after the shooting and the arrest of 24-year-old Jared Lee Loughner, who was sentenced in November to seven consecutive life sentences, plus 140 years, after he pleaded guilty to 19 federal charges.

U.S. District Judge Larry Burns had prevented the sheriff's department from releasing the records in response to a request from The Washington Post, ruling in March 2011 that Loughner's right to a fair trial outweighed whatever disclosures might be authorized under state law.

Last month, Burns cleared the way for the release of the records after Star Publishing Company, which publishes the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson, had sought their release. The judge said Loughner's fair-trial rights are no longer on the line now that his criminal case has resolved.

Loughner's guilty plea enabled him to avoid the death sentence. He is serving his sentence at a federal prison medical facility in Springfield, Mo., where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and forcibly given psychotropic drug treatments.

Arizona's chief federal judge and a 9-year-old girl were among those killed in the rampage. Giffords was left partially blind, with a paralyzed right arm and brain injury. She resigned from Congress last year and has since started, along with her husband, a gun control advocacy group.

The Star said it wanted the records because they contain information about how a mass shooting occurs, including how long it took Loughner to fire gunshots ? an issue raised by some advocates in the debate over high-capacity pistol magazines.

The Tucson newspaper argued that the records are critical in the national debate over whether such shootings could be prevented by armed resistance, whether a mass shooting occurs too quickly to be stopped and whether people with mental illnesses should be prohibited from getting guns.

Phoenix Newspapers Inc., which publishes The Arizona Republic, and KPNX-TV had joined Star Publishing in the latest effort to get the records released.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/police-reports-tucson-shooting-rampage-released-082126898.html

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Pope Benedict's legacy: More influential than Pope John Paul II?

Pope Benedict's legacy may be a willingness to let liberal Catholics leave in favor of a more orthodox church in the US and Europe.

By Robert Marquand,?Staff writer / February 11, 2013

Pope Benedict XVI delivers his message during a meeting of Vatican cardinals, at the Vatican, Monday. Pope Benedict announced Monday that he would resign at the end of the month - the first pontiff to do so in nearly 600 years.

Courtesy of L'Osservatore Romano/AP

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Pope Benedict resigns later this month after arguably being the single most influential figure inside the Roman Catholic Church for three decades, dating to the early 1980s.

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A shy but brilliant scholar whose consistent vision has been to reinstitute the grand authority held by the Vatican in the Middle Ages, Benedict has, often single-handedly, redirected his church away from the liberal experiments and sometimes amateurish enthusiasms of the Vatican II period of the 1960s, which conservatives saw as a dangerous diversion. He has also, over years, instituted doctrines, individuals, and orders consistent with his theological view of the Catholic Church as the true and only authentic one.

While not as widely beloved as his predecessor John Paul II, the popular Polish pope who helped crack the Soviet hold on eastern Europe and attracted global crowds, Benedict arguably has had more influence inside the church ??even as he often irritated Protestants who he said were not "authentic" Christians, angered Muslims by put-downs of Islamic figures, or unsettled Jewish-Catholic relations by rehabilitating a fringe religious society with a bishop who denied the severity of the Nazi holocaust.

Benedict's chief occupation as pope has been, observers say, to purify his church.?

To do so, Benedict crushed the liberation theology movements of the?third world, put a slammer hold on efforts to ordain women and question celibacy, put earlier ecumenical impulses on the back burner, and, instead, has greatly empowered more hardcore orders like Opus Dei, Legions of Christ, and other orthodox wings, largely on the idea that the church must first cherish its most ardent believers.

Yet, while Benedict has won many battles inside the church, he is also widely seen as having lost many larger wars that he either instituted or took part in.

Benedict?s effort to reinstitute Christianity in its European context has largely failed to generate enthusiasm on a continent increasingly secular. While in pursuit of liberal priests and nuns who he implied were polluting the church with wrong doctrines, Benedict has appeared to many Europeans to be too inattentive to priests who sexually abused minors, of whom there are an estimated 8,000. The revelations of sexually abusive priests in Germany, Ireland, Belgium, and Austria two years ago brought a change to the story line that such problems were restricted to the United States.?

For fully believing Catholics, the Roman church is a divine, not a human institution; its leader, the pope, is the ?vicar of Christ,? the direct spiritual descendant of Jesus Christ and his disciple Peter. The kingdom of heaven on earth that Jesus asked his followers to pray for, must, in orthodox Catholic doctrine, come through the Catholic Church and the pope, also known as the Holy Father.

For many modern-thinking or non-literal Catholics, particularly after the long-running church self-examination known as Vatican II, those orthodox doctrines of the identity of the church and the pope were put in question and thrown open for new interpretation.

Vatican II lead, though often quite indirectly, to a massive re-evaluation of things like the operation of the spirit in the church, the possibility of women being ordained as priests, a faint questioning of the doctrine, only adopted in pre-medieval Europe, of celibacy, and of more "democracy"?or power by the laity or non-clergy members in matters of church governance.

For a rising college theology professor named Joseph Ratzinger, these new interpretations were viewed with increasing horror. They often lacked seriousness, were sloppy, and seemed chaotic and undignified.

As then-Cardinal Ratzinger, Benedict took office in 1982 as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the same office that earlier conducted or oversaw heresy trials. Yet while that office has a five-year term and most predecessors held it for 10 years at most, Ratzinger stayed 24 years, only leaving to become pope in 2005.

Now, as Catholics think through their future they will do so with a set of cardinals, bishops, priests, and church authorities that have largely been vetted through the orthodox filter set up by the Bavarian-born pontiff.

Indeed, a church hierarchy carefully pruned of liberal and ecumenical impulses may be one of Benedict?s enduring legacies, though it has brought the current pontiff into serious disagreements with powerful orders, like the Jesuits, that previously saw themselves as the main defenders of Rome.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/csmonitor/globalnews/~3/fHR6tRo16ts/Pope-Benedict-s-legacy-More-influential-than-Pope-John-Paul-II

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Facebook Lets Advertisers Tap Purchase Data Partners To Target Customers, Categories Like Car-Buyers

Through new partnerships with top online and offline purchase data providers Datalogix, Epsilon, Acxiom, and BlueKai, Facebook is allowing advertisers to target hashed lists of existing and potential customers, and categories like role-playing gamers or soda drinkers. This expansion of Facebook's Custom Audiences program could rake in revenue and attract businesses by matching ads to real spenders

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