Fujifilm's XF1 makes a fashion statement at Photokina, we go hands-on (video)

Fujifilm's XF1 makes a fashion statement at Photokina, we go handson

Point-and-shoot or fashion accessory? This is the conundrum posed by the XF1, a new retro-styled point-and-shoot from Fujifilm. It's a nice looking camera with a solid and fairly light build, certainly, and while the faux leather (in black, red or tan) might not be for everyone, the company was quick to point out that it'll go nicely with your new designer handbag, for whatever that's worth. The textured design is complimented nicely by a metal border on the top and bottom. There's a bit of a learning curve here, when it comes to just turning the thing on -- give it a twist and a pull, not unlike a childproof pill cap to put it in standby and another pull to get things started.

There's a big, bright three-inch LCD on the rear of the device. Click the E-Fn button on the bottom right, and you can actually reassign the button mapping on the back to your liking on the display. Of course, such style and functionality comes at a price -- this guy will run you $500 when it goes on sale next month.

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Latest developments in protest of anti-Islam film

A look at protests and events across the world on Tuesday responding to an anti-Muslim film, nearly a week after angry crowds began assaulting a string of U.S. embassies in the Mideast.

___

AFGHANISTAN

A suicide bomber rammed a car packed with explosives into a mini-bus in Kabul, killing at least 12 people in what a militant group said was revenge for the film. Afghan President Hamid Karzai said the attack killed eight South Africans, three Afghans and a Kyrgyzstani ? all aviation workers who were headed to the capital's airport. A spokesman for the Islamist militant group Hizb-i-Islami claimed responsibility for the dawn attack and said it was carried out by a 22-year-old woman.

___

EGYPT

General prosecutor issued arrest warrants for seven Egyptian Coptic Christians and a Florida-based American pastor Terry Jones and referred them to trial on charges linked to an anti-Islam film. The prosecutor's office said in a statement that the accused, which includes the film's alleged producer, face charges of harming national unity, insulting and publicly attacking Islam and spreading false information. The office said they could face the death penalty, if convicted.

___

ISRAEL

About 500 Palestinians demonstrated against the film in the Shuafat refugee camp in east Jerusalem, chanting "We love you Mohammed" and "We will all sacrifice ourselves for the Prophet."

Some 200 people marched to a nearby Israeli checkpoint, lobbing rocks and firebombs at security forces, who fired stun grenades, tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse the protesters. No serious injuries were reported.

___

BANGLADESH

A spokesman for the state-run Bangladesh Telecommunications Company Ltd. said the Bangladeshi government blocked YouTube late Monday to prevent people from seeing the video. The spokesman in Dhaka, Mir Mohammaed Morshed, said the decision will remain effective until further notice.

___

INDONESIA

About 200 people from various Islamic groups torched an American flag and tires outside the U.S. Consulate in Medan, the nation's third-largest city. Some unfurled banners saying, "Go to hell America," while others trampled on dozens of paper flags. In Makassar, about 100 Muslim students called for the death penalty against the filmmaker, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula. Protests also occurred in Gorontalo and in Palu, where protesters were calling for a boycott of U.S. and allied products. About 50 protesters at KFC and Texas Chicken restaurants forced customers to leave and management to close the stores.

___

KASHMIR

Marchers burned U.S. flags and an effigy of President Barack Obama, shutting down businesses and public transportation in Srinagar. Police fired tear gas and used batons to disperse rock-throwing protesters as they tried to enter the main business district. The bar association, trade unions and separatist groups supported the shutdown.

___

NORTH AFRICA

A statement on militant websites from Al-Qaida in the Land of the Islamic Maghreb praised the Sept. 11 killing of U.S. ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens in an attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi. The group threatened attacks in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco and Mauritania, and condemned the United States. It urged Muslims to pull down and burn American flags at embassies, and kill or expel American diplomats to "purge our land of their filth in revenge for the honor of the Prophet."

___

PAKISTAN

Hundreds of angry protesters broke through a barricade outside the U.S. Consulate in the northwest city of Peshawar. Demonstrators threw bricks and flaming wads of cloth at the police, who pushed them back by firing tear gas and rubber bullets and charging with batons. Several were wounded on both sides. The protest was organized by the youth wing of the hardline Jamaat-e-Islami party.

___

THAILAND

An estimated 400 people protested peacefully outside the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok, where protesters carried signs and banners saying, "We love Prophet Muhammad" and "Stop insulting our religion," and chanting, "Down with America" and "Down with Israel." The demonstration was organized by a group called the International Al Quds Federation of Thailand, which had called for a peaceful protest on its Facebook page. About 700 police were on hand to maintain order.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/latest-developments-protest-anti-islam-film-183759587.html

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Chicago teachers 'not happy' with proposed contract

Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis says delegates have decided to extend their weeklong strike until at least Wednesday to give them time to consult with rank-and-file members before voting to suspend the walkout. Watch her news conference.

By NBC News and wire services

Updated at 10:15 p.m. ET: Delegates from the Chicago Teachers Union told their bargaining team Sunday that they want to meet with the schools they represent before making a decision about whether to end their strike.

"They?re not happy with the agreement and would like it to be a lot better for us than it is," Union President Karen Lewis said in a news briefing Sunday evening, adding that they are returning to their schools with the proposal because they do not want to feel rushed to make a decision.

That means Chicago public schools will remained closed Monday and likely Tuesday, affecting 350,000 kindergarten, elementary and high school students. Parents should plan for their children to be out of school until at least Wednesday, Lewis said.??

Following the announcement, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, calling the strike "illegal," said he would file an injunction to force an end to the walkout.

"I will not stand by while the children of Chicago are played as pawns in an internal dispute within a union," Emanuel said, adding that the union walked out over issues that are not subject to a strike under Illinois state law.?

A union bargaining team and city officials had hammered out a proposed contract that would move away from merit pay and allow teachers to appeal their evaluations.?


Sitthixay Ditthavong / AP

Chicago Teachers Union delegates arrive for a meeting Sunday in which they are expected to review a proposed contract and vote whether to suspend the week-long strike.

A faction of the union sees it as a "back room deal" that does not have unified support. A source close to the union told NBC Chicago that Lewis' caucus shouted obscenities at her and other leaders late Saturday night, saying, "You sold out" and, "Rahm's getting everything they wanted, what the hell did we get?"???

Lewis, exhausted from a tense week, indicated that she's done negotiating and asked "Will my own caucus defy me?"

At the heart of those who oppose this new deal - they feel the negotiating team did not fight for paraprofessionals and special education teachers and students.

Read full coverage at NBCChicago.com

Some delegates shouted at Lewis there is "no way to vote on something we haven't seen."

Teachers revolted last week against sweeping education reforms sought by Emanuel, especially evaluating teachers based on the standardized test scores of their students. They also fear a wave of neighborhood school closings that could result in mass teacher layoffs. They want a guarantee that laid-off teachers will be recalled for other jobs in the district.

"They're still not happy with the evaluations. They're not happy with the recall (provision)," Lewis said of delegates.?

Still, Lewis seemed energized in a statement Saturday night, buoyed by the agreement, which came after a weeklong strike that began on Sept. 10.

"This union has proven the Chicago labor movement is neither dormant nor dead," Lewis said in a statement on the union?s blog late on Saturday. "We have solidified our political power and captured the imagination of the nation. No one will ever look upon a teacher and think of him or her as a passive, person to be bullied and walked on ever again."

Emanuel's chief negotiator, School Board President David Vitale, said the union should allow children to go back to school while the two sides complete the process.

"We are extremely disappointed that after 10 months of discussion reaching an honest and fair compromise that (the union) decided to continue their strike of choice and keep our children out of the classroom," Vitale said.

The contract includes what Lewis called victories for the 29,000 union members, which she outlined on the union?s website: ?

PAY: The teachers union wants a three-year contract that guarantees a 3-percent increase the first year and 2-percent increases for the second and third years. The contract also includes the possibility of being extended a fourth year with a 3-percent raise. A first-year teacher earns about $49,000, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality; the highest-paid teacher earns $92,227.

Chicago Public Schools would move away from merit pay for individual teachers.

EVALUATION: Teachers would be evaluated 70 percent in terms of how they teach (?teacher practice?) and 30 percent in terms of how their students improve (?student growth?). Evaluations will not affect tenured teachers during the first year, and teachers may appeal their evaluation. ?

HIRES: Responding to parent demands, Chicago Public Schools would hire more than 600 teachers specialized in art, music, physical education and foreign languages, among other teacher specialties. More than half of large school districts rehire laid-off teachers, according to The New York Times; the Chicago school board has pushed to leave control to principals.

Those new hires will allow for the longer class day ? which will be seven hours for elementary school students, up from five hours and 45 minutes. Chicago had been known for one of the shortest school days in the country -- a point that became a sticking point for Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

Of those new hires, half must be union employees who were previously laid off. (Higher-rated teachers would have a better chance at being rehired, the Chicago Tribune reported.)

BULLYING: The contract demands ending bullying by principals and managerial personnel to ?curtail some of the abusive practices that have run rampant in many neighborhood schools.? Principals, however, will continue to exercise power over hiring teachers, the Tribune reported.

In one instance, according to CBS Chicago, dozens of complaints were made about a principal at Josiah Pickard Elementary School during his five years on the job. A union representative told CBS Chicago that the volume of complaints was not normal for a principal.

TEXTBOOKS: Chicago students would have their textbooks on the first day of school instead of having to wait up to six weeks

Related: Chicago strike: Will teachers union approve proposed contract?

The strike may have hurt Mayor Rahm Emanuel?s image as a hard-nosed innovator, the Chicago Tribune reported, largely because of the mayor?s aggressive statements about teachers ? which he implied after the school board nixed half their pay raise.

The strike received nationwide attention in part because Chicago is the third-largest school district in the nation and its teachers hadn?t gone on strike for 25 years, since 1987.

But the strike has made headlines also because Emanuel was Obama?s first chief of staff. Obama, whose daughters attended the private University of Chicago Laboratory School (known as the ?Lab school?), campaigned on public school reform and has advocated merit pay.

On Friday, Emanuel released a more muted statement than his ones in the past, according to the Tribune:

"This tentative framework is an honest and principled compromise that is about who we all work for: our students. It preserves more time for learning in the classroom, provides more support for teachers to excel at their craft and gives principals the latitude and responsibility to build an environment in which our children can succeed."

Emanuel had argued for a long school day ? which he appears to have achieved with the proposed contract.?For high schools, the bell would ring after seven and a half hours.

The contract doesn?t end the school district?s woes, however. After school doors open again, the school district is likely to shutter schools to help close a projected $1 billion budget deficit for the 2014-1015 school year, according to the Tribune.

NBC's Isolde Raftery and Reuters contributed to this report.

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Source: http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/09/16/13899588-chicago-teachers-not-happy-with-proposed-contract-strike-continues?lite

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The Ann Arbor Chronicle | Main & Ann

Stopped. Watched. icon

First sighting of the stringing of holiday lights. The guy says they start now, but don?t turn them on until later. But still, it remains summer until Saturday! [photo]

? Want more items like this one? Visit the Stopped. Watched. page.

Copyright 2012 The Ann Arbor Chronicle.

Source: http://annarborchronicle.com/2012/09/16/main-ann-13/

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Amazon, other Web retailers start collecting California sales tax

SACRAMENTO ? The days of most tax-free Internet shopping in California are over.

After years of controversy, the world's largest online retailer, Amazon.com Inc., was set to begin collecting state and local sales taxes on California purchases at 12:01 a.m. Saturday. Depending on where you live, sales taxes in the state range from 7.25% to 9.75%.

New state and local government revenues from Amazon alone are expected to be as high as $100 million during the first year of collection, with the total for all Internet sellers reaching $317 million in the year that began July 1. Much more money is expected to flow into government coffers in coming years as e-shopping expands.

California consumers are divided on the Internet sales tax issue. Many who have avoided taxes in the past were rushing to make last-minute tax-free purchases Friday. "Definitely stocking up ? can't beat 8% or 9% savings," tweeted Patrick Chen, who identified himself on Twitter as an Internet game developer.

Others see the sales tax as a matter of fairness. "You pay it any time you go to the store," Newport Beach Internet shopper Sarah Lafare said. "People who bellyache about it, I'm not in sympathy with them."

Experts say Amazon purchases in California account for about half of all online purchases statewide. But Saturday is also a big day for many other Internet merchants, whose sales operations require them to start collecting the sales tax as spelled out by a 2011 state law.

Both Amazon and state officials, who have been at loggerheads for years over the issue of Internet sales taxes, say they're prepared for the big change.

"The agency is ready," said Jerome E. Horton, chairman of the state Board of Equalization, which administers the sales tax. The tax-collecting agency plans to hire as many as 35 new auditors, collectors, lawyers and other personnel over the next three years, and will redirect to the Internet sales tax effort some of its 90 existing investigators on an "as-needed basis," he said.

The tax agency's staff should have a good sense of which of the hundreds of out-of-state Internet sellers are responsible for collecting California sales taxes and how much money they should be sending to Sacramento, Horton said.

"We expect some to seek to gain market share by advertising that they're not collecting, telling the whole world," he said. "But we'll be listening as well."

Horton said he's pleased that Amazon finally is "playing by the rules."

After fighting legislative efforts to force it to collect sales taxes, Amazon last year struck a deal with Gov. Jerry Brown. The company promised to open two 1-million-square-foot distribution centers in Northern and Southern California and start charging sales tax as of Saturday.

The deal resulted in "a win-win law that has allowed us to expand our investment and job creation in the state," Amazon spokesman Scott Stanzel said. Amazon's experience in states where it collects the sales tax proves that "we offer customers the best prices with or without sales taxes" in addition to having "vast selection and fast delivery," Stanzel said.

Amazon's buying power and high volume sales, even without the no-sales-tax advantage, make its prices extremely competitive: as much as 6% less than prices for the same goods in stores or on other websites, according to a 2011 study by the Chicago investment firm of William Blair & Co.

How consumers will react to Amazon being on a more competitive level with brick-and-mortar retailers, such as Best Buy Co. and Barnes & Noble Inc., may soon be apparent, said Miro Copic, a marketing professor at San Diego State University. "Consumers may hold off from making an impulse buy" online, if the price isn't that much different from what a product costs at the local mall, he said.

Upcoming financial reports are likely to reveal whether the change in the California law has any effect on Amazon. The Seattle company reported sales for the three months that ended June 30 of $12.83 billion, up 29% from the same quarter in 2011.

The fight over Internet sales taxes is not over. The drive for uniform taxation of retail sales nationwide is led by supporters of brick-and-mortar stores whose shoppers have always paid the levy in those states with sales taxes.

Now that Amazon has agreed to collect sales taxes in California, the challenge is to persuade Congress to pass a federal law that would set standards for collecting similar levies in every state that has a sales tax, said Bill Dombrowski, president of the California Retailers Assn.

Retailers have waged a campaign that passed Internet sales tax laws in New York, Illinois and California as well as smaller states, he said. Their strategy was to "get enough critical mass" so that the politicians in Washington, D.C., "could no longer ignore this."

In the meantime, passage of the California law could mean the difference between survival and bankruptcy for many smaller store owners, who faced unfair competition from Amazon and other online sellers, Dombrowski said.

"That was their No. 1 threat," he said.

marc.lifsher@latimes.com

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/latimes/business/~3/0VqgLg1Nkbs/la-fi-amazon-sales-tax-20120915,0,346105.story

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Chemist develops new synthesis of most useful, yet expensive, antimalarial drug

Friday, September 14, 2012

In 2010 malaria caused an estimated 665,000 deaths, mostly among African children. Now, chemists at Indiana University have developed a new synthesis for the world's most useful antimalarial drug, artemisinin, giving hope that fully synthetic artemisinin might help reduce the cost of the live-saving drug in the future.

Effective deployment of ACT, or artemisinin-based combination therapy, has been slow due to high production costs of artemisinin. The World Health Organization has set a target "per gram" cost for artemisinin of 25 cents or less, but the current cost is about $2.40 per gram, and production of low-cost semi-synthetic artemisinin has yet to materialize.

"In 2005, the WHO claimed that the structure of artemisinin was too complex for cost-effective synthesis," said IU Bloomington College of Arts and Sciences chemistry professor Silas Cook. "We saw this as a natural challenge to the creativity and tenacity of organic chemists."

Published recently in the Journal of the American Chemical Societyas "A Concise Synthesis of Artemisinin," Cook and postdoctoral co-author Chunyin Zhu report a succinct five-part process beginning with inexpensive cyclohexenone, an ideal feedstock available on metric-ton scale. Subsequent chemistry highlights several new reactions developed in the Cook group to enable this short, low-cost synthesis.

The result was the production of fully synthetic artemisinin on gram scale, greater than all previous total syntheses combined.

"The key to the ultimate success of synthetic artemisinin will be the large-scale production of the drug," Cook said. "As such, we had to completely rethink what qualified as suitable starting materials for this synthesis and invent new chemistry." The result was the use of readily available commodity chemicals in a process that was shorter than any other artemisinin total synthesis ever conducted.

The next challenge will be to move from gram-scale to kilogram-scale production, a process Cook may or may not be involved with.

"There is still work to be done. And we'd love to do it here, but the project has yet to attract outside funding," he said. "This is still in an experimental phase until you can scale up. We patented it, so the intellectual property rights are in place."

###

Indiana University: http://newsinfo.iu.edu

Thanks to Indiana University for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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Three dead as protesters attack U.S. embassy in Tunisia

TUNIS (Reuters) - At least three people died and 28 others were wounded on Friday after police fought hundreds of protesters who ransacked the U.S. embassy in Tunisia in their fury over a U.S.-made film insulting the Prophet Mohammad, state television said.

A Reuters reporter saw police open fire to try to quell the assault, in which protesters forced their way past riot police into the embassy.

The protesters smashed windows, hurled petrol bombs and stones at police from inside the embassy, or started fires in the embassy and the compound. A black plume of smoke rose from the facility.

One protester was seen throwing a computer out of a window, while others walked away with telephones and computers.

A Tunisian security officer near the compound said the embassy had not been staffed on Friday, and calls to the embassy went unanswered. A Reuters reporter saw two armed U.S. soldiers on the rooftop.

The protesters, many of whom were Islamic Salafists, also set fire to the nearby American School, which was closed at the time, and took away laptops and tablet computers.

The protests began after Friday prayers and followed a rallying call on Facebook by Islamist activists that was quickly endorsed by the local faction of the Islamic militant group Ansar al-Sharia.

Libyan officials suspect the Libyan branch of Ansar al-Sharia of being behind an attack in Benghazi in which four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya, were killed on Tuesday.

The moderate Islamist Ennahda movement, which heads the Tunis government, had advised Tunisians against participating in the protest.

"The (Tunisian) government does not accept these acts of aggression against foreign diplomatic missions," said a statement read on state television. It said Tunisian authorities were "committed to ensuring the safety of foreign diplomatic missions".

Hundreds of protesters wielding petrol bombs, stones and sticks had charged at the security forces protecting the embassy before jumping a wall to invade the compound.

"Obama, Obama, we are all Osamas," they chanted, in reference to the slain al Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden.

The protesters pulled down the U.S. flag flying over the embassy, burned it, and replaced it with a black flag emblazoned with the Shahada, the Islamic declaration of faith.

Riot police finally drove the protesters from the embassy and the compound, and a Reuters reporter saw them arresting around 60.

The compound was cordoned off by police, soldiers and members of the elite presidential guard, but clashes continued in the el-Aouina district across a highway from the smart Auberge du Lac neighborhood where the embassy is located.

(Reporting By Tarek Amara; Writing by Souhail Karam; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/protesters-attack-u-embassy-cradle-arab-spring-165247459.html

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Great Recession's pain still felt by many in US

By John W. Schoen, NBC News

The poor stayed poor and the rich got richer, but the middle?slipped a few more rungs down the economic ladder.

More than five years after the Great Recession began, the lingering impact of the worst downturn in a half-century continues to deplete the standard of living of middle-class American households.

Median household income, after adjusting for inflation, fell 1.5 percent last year to $50,054,?according to the Census Bureau's annual report?on income and poverty issued released Wednesday. The poverty rate, at 15 percent, remained stuck at the highest level since 1993.

For Ray Bober, 45, of Pittsburgh, whose unemployment benefits ran out this year after a family printing business failed several years ago, the dismal economy takes a toll every time he sends out another resume that goes nowhere.

?You have to learn to roll with the punches and laugh a little; it?s very depressing,? he said. ?It takes a toll, especially this long. You want to reach out and shake your fist in the air and blame someone, but you can?t. The way it is, is the way it is. There?s nothing you can do about it but stay in the fight."

For millions of middle-class American households, the fight began well before the Great Recession destroyed more than 8 million jobs, or even before the financial collapse in 2008 that gave birth to the downturn. Median household income, adjusted for inflation, has been dropping for 13 years.

The?drop?in income has been magnified by the persistent high unemployment, currently above 8?percent, which peaked at a monthly pace of?more than 800,000 jobs shed in November 2008. On top of job growth that's been weaker than any recovery in a half-century, wages haven't budged since the recession ended.

Last year, median family household income fell 1.7 percent, to $62,273, according to the Census Bureau. ?The decline has left income for those in the median 8.1 percent lower than in 2007, the year before the recession began, and 8.9 percent lower than the median peak in 1999.

?The lasting impact (of the Great Recession) has been at levels above the poverty level,? said Tim Smeedling, director of the Institute for Research on Poverty University of Wisconsin?Madison. ?It?s been in the middle."

To cope with falling wages, many households have ?doubled up? to share expenses. There were about 22.3 million such "shared" households as of last spring, up from 19.7 million when the recession began, according to the Census data.

For many, moving back home is the only way to avoid falling into poverty.

?Family is the oldest welfare program in the world,? said Smeedling. ?But if they move back in with their parents, given that most parents' income is somewhat higher than poverty, they won?t be counted as being poor. This doubling up conceals some of the impact of poverty.?

Bober is one of those for whom family offers the last threads of a social safety net. He lives with his mother and sister in the inner city house he grew up in.

?Between the bunch of us we pull together well,? he said. ?But we?re backsliding.?

Not everyone is falling behind. While the median income slipped last year, those at the top of the income ladder continued to move ahead. The top 5 percent of incomes rose by 5.3 percent last year, according to government data.

Those at the very bottom of the ladder continue to struggle, but their numbers stopped growing last year. The government said 46.2 million Americans were living in poverty last year, statistically the same as in 2010. The determination of poverty is based on a number of factors but typically a family of four was considered to be in poverty last year if its total household income was less than $23,021.

The government?s official poverty threshold is calculated using a half-century-old formula based on the average household?s food budget. To determine whether a household falls below that threshold, the Census adds up cash income including earnings, Social Security benefits, unemployment insurance and other government assistance paid in cash, plus interest and dividends on savings and investments. The Census doesn?t count non-cash assistance like food stamps or the earned income tax credit, which pays workers who make poverty-level wages.

Those assistance programs have helped blunt the impact on the very poor in ways that the government?s official numbers don?t fully capture. If the value of food stamps were included in the income calculation, for example, some 3.9 million fewer people would have fallen below the threshold last year, according to the latest data. If the earned income tax credit were included, another 3 million fewer children would be included.

The comparisons also illustrate the impact of the broadest safety net programs. If unemployment insurance were excluded from the income calculations, for example, another 16 million people aged 18 to 64 would have fallen below the poverty line last year. If Social Security benefits weren?t counted, another 14.5 million people would have fallen below the line.

But many long-term unemployed end up without those financial lifelines.

?People used to fall out of work all the time and onto a safety net,? said Arloc Sherman, a senior researcher at the?Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. "Now the kind of safety net we have is very work-based. So if you lose work, you fall to nothing. ?

The number of families at the very bottom of the ladder has remained relatively stable. But they?re not necessarily the same families, said Sherman.

?A lot of people who are at the bottom in one year weren?t there one or two or three years ago,? he said. ?It?s not?so much that there?s a growth of a new underclass that stays constantly at the bottom quite.

The latest Census data bear that out, as the number of people working full-time, year-round rose by more than two million, many of them shifting from part-time jobs to full time jobs, but at the lower end of the income spectrum. ?

?We think that shift from part-time to full-time could have kept the poverty rate from rising,? said David Johnson, head of the?Census Bureau's Social, Economic and Housing Statistics Division.

Pulling income lower
The growth of full-time employment on the low end of the wage scale also helped pull the median income lower, however, he said.

Confronted with a dismal job market, many of those out of work have tried going back to school, contributing to?the recent drop in the official count of the U.S. labor force to the lowest in three years.

Government statistics offer hope that the investment in time and money will pay off. The?unemployment rate for workers with a college degree stood at 4.9 percent last year compared with 9.4 percent for those with a high school diploma and 14.1 percent for those without one. The median weekly earnings for college graduates was $1,263 compared to $638 for Americans with just a high school diploma.

?Certainly, there?s been a lasting impact on people who don?t have college educations,? said Smeeding. ?They?re having a real hard time.? ?

So are many jobless workers who lack?the savings to pay for college. Bober tried that tack, enrolling in a local community college, but fell short of money for tuition and books when his unemployment benefits ran out.

Competition for low-skilled, low-wage jobs remains fierce, as he recently found out when he applied for a job as a night stock manager at a local retail outlet.

?I have management experience. When I was younger I used to call on supermarkets,? he said. ?So I figured, ?Hey I can move boxes just like the next guy. They emailed me back after a couple of days and said, ?Sorry you didn?t meet our qualifications.'"

The experience, he said, was a sobering reminder of the dismal employment outlook.

?It scared me because I always felt you can get a lesser job in life. Just suck it up; you can always find work,? he said. ?That isn?t true. And that?s a scary, scary thing."

Bober says he gets by these days doing odd jobs. He helps out a friend who owns a local funeral home. He?s landed work as an extra on film and television shows shot in Pittsburgh.

He doesn?t blame anyone in particular for his seemingly relentless search. But, as a former small businessman, he thinks something?s badly wrong with the American way of earning a living.

?When I was a kid, if a guy wanted to go an print up some Steelers T-shirts in his garage and show up at the football game and make up a couple of bucks, that was an enterprising guy.? He said. ?It was a hard-working upstanding citizen. Now, the government and the lawyers come and you?re a bootlegger.?

Related:

Economy's long slump pushing many down the ladder

After climbing economic ladder, one family fears falling backward

Mobile food pantry serves families in need

Source: http://economywatch.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/09/12/13830939-great-recession-still-slamming-the-middle-class?lite

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