June Jobs Report Shows Steady Improvement

The Labor Department reported unemployment stayed steady at 7.6 percent as 195,000 jobs were added, an improvement from the slow but steady growth that's become the norm since the last recession.

All eyes are on the Labor Department's employment report and the labor market since the Federal Reserve has tied the tapering of its bond purchase program in part to the unemployment rate.

Robert G. Murphy, economics professor at Boston College, expected a gain of about 165,000 jobs in June.

"This morning's employment report showing a jobs gain of 195,000 is good news that the recovery may now be on a sustained path," he said. "Combined with revisions to the two previous months gains totaling 70,000 additional jobs, the latest number certainly is reassuring. But the job gain merely kept pace with the rise in the labor force, so that the number of unemployed, at 11.8 million, was essentially unchanged. Greater gains in jobs will be needed to push unemployment down significantly over the next year."

Some negative news in June's report is that part-time work -- because of "slack work or business conditions" -- is up over 350,000 from May to June. In addition, the number of discouraged workers now tops 1 million, up 247,000 from May to June.

As expected, the average workweek stayed steady at 34.5 hours. Average hourly earnings increased by 5 cents to $20.14 after being unchanged in May.

Last month, the Labor Department reported an unemployment rate of 7.6 percent with the addition of 175,000 jobs in May, which was revised to 195,000. Job additions for April were revised to 199,000 from 149,000.

"Despite the healthy growth from private companies (many are growing sales by double digits), looking at today's report, the unemployment rate is still not where we'd expect it to be at this point in the recovery. Despite strong balance sheet and income statement performance, many companies remain very resistant to increasing their overhead by hiring and taking on debt," said Brian Hamilton, chairman of Sageworks.

Recent comments by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, which clarified the Fed's asset purchase policy without a change in policy, have set markets on edge, so that Friday's report likely is receiving much greater attention than it probably warrants, Murphy said.

After this report, Murphy said the Federal Reserve is "unlikely to begin removing stimulus at its July meeting."

Murphy said the report needs to be placed in the context of "a recovery that continues to be very sluggish." Last week, the Commerce Department reported a downward revision for first quarter GDP growth of 1.8 percent and a consensus growth forecast of 2.5 to 2.8 percent over the rest of this year. Murphy said those figures are not high enough to sustain job gains consistent with a decline in the unemployment rate toward the 7 percent marker that Bernanke has indicated for ending the asset purchase program, provided inflation doesn't spike.

Read More About the Fed's $85 Billion a Month Bond Purchasing Program

Murphy cautioned that the monthly job gains are subject to statistical error of around 90,000, which may be amplified for June when students and others take seasonal jobs.

"Hence, a strong gain this month would need to be sustained for several months to reflect a meaningful upshift in labor market performance," he said, adding that the average monthly gain of 178,000 in jobs for March to May represents a slowdown from the average gain of 233,000 for December to February.

"So even if the report shows strong employment growth, the Fed is unlikely to decide to begin tapering its asset purchases when it meets later this month," Murphy said. "The Fed will want to wait until its September meeting when it will have employment numbers for July and August in hand."

Stephen Bronars, senior economist with Welch Consulting, said the pattern in the jobs reports of the last year will likely to continue.

"The primary concern that economists have is that this is the new normal for the economy: slow, steady, but unspectacular growth in both GDP and employment," Bronars said.

This "new normal" Bronars refers to employment growth just keeping pace with population growth over the past year as the economy created 175,000 to 180,000 jobs per month. Bronars adds that the unemployment rate has fallen to 7.6 percent from 8.2 percent over the past year largely because people have given up looking for work and are no longer counted as unemployed. Meanwhile, the fraction of adults who are employed has not changed in the past three years because of relatively slow growth and the aging of the U.S. workforce, he said.

Job additions in the leisure and hospitality sector were the strongest at 75,000, about 2.5 times the growth in leisure and hospitality in 2012. Employers in professional and business services added 53,000 jobs.

Employment in June for the construction sector showed little change. Recovery in the construction sector has been "painfully slow," Bronars said.

Although construction employment is up 3.5 percent in the past year -- more than twice as fast as the rest of the workforce -- the sector has regained only about 13 percent of the 2.2 million construction jobs lost in the recession.

"There needs to be much stronger growth in construction employment to signal that economic growth has accelerated," Bronars said.

On Wednesday, two reports showed signs of optimism for the labor market.

Private payroll provider ADP said companies added 188,000 jobs in June, the largest gain since February and up from 134,000 in May. Construction employers added 21,000 jobs, a possible indication that a housing recovery is boosting job growth.

Also on Wednesday, the Labor Department reported the number of Americans filing unemployment claims fell 5,000 to a seasonally adjusted 343,000.

Last week, the S&P/Case-Shiller survey of 20 major metro areas reported a strong increase in average home prices with prices rising in all the cities it tracks; and the Commerce Department reported new home sales rose in May to the fastest pace in five years

Joe "JJ" Kinahan, chief strategist with TD Ameritrade, said the overall headline number in June's report was "fantastic".

"The market has held its tremendous overnight gains and all in all it looks to be very positive for equities," he said, while "the bond market has taken it on the chin" as ten-year yields have pushed to almost 2.65 percent.

His concern, he said, is "that we keep this great momentum going forward and that we have a better quality of jobs created."

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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/june-jobs-report-shows-steady-improvement-152631481.html

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Teens' self-consciousness linked with specific brain, physiological responses

Public release date: 2-Jul-2013
[ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Scott Sleek
ssleek@psychologicalscience.org
202-293-9300
Association for Psychological Science

Teenagers are famously self-conscious, acutely aware and concerned about what their peers think of them. A new study reveals that this self-consciousness is linked with specific physiological and brain responses that seem to emerge and peak in adolescence.

"Our study identifies adolescence as a unique period of the lifespan in which self-conscious emotion, physiological reactivity, and activity in specific brain areas converge and peak in response to being evaluated by others," says psychological scientist and lead researcher Leah Somerville of Harvard University.

The findings, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggest that teens' sensitivity to social evaluation might be explained by shifts in physiological and brain function during adolescence, in addition to the numerous sociocultural changes that take place during the teen years.

Somerville and colleagues wanted to investigate whether just being looked at a minimal social-evaluation situation might register with greater importance, arousal, and intensity for adolescents than for either children or adults. The researchers hypothesized that late-developing regions of the brain, such as the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), could play a unique role in the way teens monitor these types of social evaluative contexts.

The researchers had 69 participants, ranging in age from 8 to almost 23 years old, come to the lab and complete measures that gauged emotional, physiological, and neural responses to social evaluation.

They told the participants that they would be testing a new video camera embedded in the head coil of a functional MRI scanner. The participants watched a screen indicating whether the camera was "off," "warming up," or "on", and were told that a same-sex peer of about the same age would be watching the video feed and would be able to see them when the camera was on. In reality, there was no camera in the MRI machine.

The consistency and strength of the resulting data took the researchers by surprise:

"We were concerned about whether simply being looked at was a strong enough 'social evaluation' to evoke emotional, physiological and neural responses," says Somerville. "Our findings suggest that being watched, and to some extent anticipating being watched, were sufficient to elicit self-conscious emotional responses at each level of measurement."

Specifically, participants' self-reported embarrassment, physiological arousal, and MPFC activation showed reactivity to social evaluation that seemed to converge and peak during adolescence.

Adolescent participants also showed increased functional connectivity between the MPFC and striatum, an area of the brain that mediates motivated behaviors and actions. Somerville and colleagues speculate that the MPFC-striatum pathway may be a route by which social evaluative contexts influence behavior. The link may provide an initial clue as to why teens often engage in riskier behaviors when they're with their peers.

###

Co-authors on the study include B.J. Casey, Rebecca M. Jones, Erika J. Ruberry, and Jonathan P. Dyke of Weill Cornell Medical College and Gary Glover of Stanford University.

This work was supported by K99 MH078713 and the Mortimer D. Sackler family.

For more information about this study, please contact: Leah H. Somerville at somerville@fas.harvard.edu.

The APS journal Psychological Science is the highest ranked empirical journal in psychology. For a copy of the article "The Medial Prefrontal Cortex and the Emergence of Self-Conscious Emotion in Adolescence" and access to other Psychological Science research findings, please contact Scott Sleek at 202-293-9300 or ssleek@psychologicalscience.org.

---

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?

AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Public release date: 2-Jul-2013
[ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Scott Sleek
ssleek@psychologicalscience.org
202-293-9300
Association for Psychological Science

Teenagers are famously self-conscious, acutely aware and concerned about what their peers think of them. A new study reveals that this self-consciousness is linked with specific physiological and brain responses that seem to emerge and peak in adolescence.

"Our study identifies adolescence as a unique period of the lifespan in which self-conscious emotion, physiological reactivity, and activity in specific brain areas converge and peak in response to being evaluated by others," says psychological scientist and lead researcher Leah Somerville of Harvard University.

The findings, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggest that teens' sensitivity to social evaluation might be explained by shifts in physiological and brain function during adolescence, in addition to the numerous sociocultural changes that take place during the teen years.

Somerville and colleagues wanted to investigate whether just being looked at a minimal social-evaluation situation might register with greater importance, arousal, and intensity for adolescents than for either children or adults. The researchers hypothesized that late-developing regions of the brain, such as the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), could play a unique role in the way teens monitor these types of social evaluative contexts.

The researchers had 69 participants, ranging in age from 8 to almost 23 years old, come to the lab and complete measures that gauged emotional, physiological, and neural responses to social evaluation.

They told the participants that they would be testing a new video camera embedded in the head coil of a functional MRI scanner. The participants watched a screen indicating whether the camera was "off," "warming up," or "on", and were told that a same-sex peer of about the same age would be watching the video feed and would be able to see them when the camera was on. In reality, there was no camera in the MRI machine.

The consistency and strength of the resulting data took the researchers by surprise:

"We were concerned about whether simply being looked at was a strong enough 'social evaluation' to evoke emotional, physiological and neural responses," says Somerville. "Our findings suggest that being watched, and to some extent anticipating being watched, were sufficient to elicit self-conscious emotional responses at each level of measurement."

Specifically, participants' self-reported embarrassment, physiological arousal, and MPFC activation showed reactivity to social evaluation that seemed to converge and peak during adolescence.

Adolescent participants also showed increased functional connectivity between the MPFC and striatum, an area of the brain that mediates motivated behaviors and actions. Somerville and colleagues speculate that the MPFC-striatum pathway may be a route by which social evaluative contexts influence behavior. The link may provide an initial clue as to why teens often engage in riskier behaviors when they're with their peers.

###

Co-authors on the study include B.J. Casey, Rebecca M. Jones, Erika J. Ruberry, and Jonathan P. Dyke of Weill Cornell Medical College and Gary Glover of Stanford University.

This work was supported by K99 MH078713 and the Mortimer D. Sackler family.

For more information about this study, please contact: Leah H. Somerville at somerville@fas.harvard.edu.

The APS journal Psychological Science is the highest ranked empirical journal in psychology. For a copy of the article "The Medial Prefrontal Cortex and the Emergence of Self-Conscious Emotion in Adolescence" and access to other Psychological Science research findings, please contact Scott Sleek at 202-293-9300 or ssleek@psychologicalscience.org.

---

[ | E-mail | Share ]

?

AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-07/afps-tsl070113.php

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Taliban hit NATO supply compound in Kabul, kill 7

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) ? Taliban suicide attackers blew up a truck bomb early Tuesday at the gates of a NATO supplier's compound in Kabul and sprayed gunfire at security personnel, killing five guards and two civilians, Afghan officials said.

The morning attack was the latest in a series targeting high-profile locations in the Afghan capital. The attacks have made clear the Taliban have no intention of ending the violence, even as they say they are willing to enter peace negotiations.

The U.N. deputy chief, Jan Eliasson, who was in Kabul wrapping up a five-day trip to Afghanistan when the attack took place, said continued violence could only harm the Taliban's own cause.

"I would hope that there would be steps taken by the leadership of the Taliban to realize that the tool of violence in any case cannot instill confidence in the population," he said. "There's been too much suffering there and there are too many widows, too many father-and-motherless children in Afghanistan and I think we need to instill a sense of calm."

But the Taliban showed no signs of backing off, telling The Associated Press by phone that Tuesday's attack was part of its offensive started in the spring to target military and diplomatic sites with suicide bombers.

"This has no link to the peace process," the militants' spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said. "It will continue all over the country occupied by the foreigners."

The attack started before dawn, when a suicide bomber drove a small truck to the outer gate of the logistics center used to supply NATO troops and detonated it. The explosion made a massive crater in the ground and damaged a guard tower, said Kabul provincial police chief Mohammad Ayuob Salangi.

Two truck drivers waiting nearby to enter the compound were also killed in the blast, along with the bomber.

Four gunmen then stormed into the breach and battled with security guards, and an Afghan police special response team that was called in, for about an hour before being killed, the Interior Ministry said in a statement. One Afghan and four Nepalese guards were also killed, the ministry said.

Mujahid quickly claimed responsibility for the assault, saying it was "a very effective attack that embarrassed the enemy."

In a statement on the Taliban website, Mujahid said only three militants were involved in the "attack on a big foreign base important for NATO logistics," and listed them by name.

The Taliban last month opened a new political office in the Gulf nation of Qatar, and indicated that they were prepared to enter into Afghan peace talks, but at the same time did not renounce violence.

The following week, Taliban suicide attackers were able to get past preliminary security checks and open fire on guards at a gate to the presidential palace in a bold attack at the heart of the Afghan government.

Earlier in June, heavily armed fighters launched a failed assault on NATO's operational headquarters at Kabul's international airport and blew up a car bomb outside Afghanistan's Supreme Court.

Eliasson said if U.N. support was needed to help start the peace process, he was glad to provide it ? but only if requested by the Afghan government.

"The reconciliation process must be, if it is to be successful, Afghan-led," he said. "What I hope will take place is, of course, contacts between the two parties ... and as long as those contacts continue, there's no specific need for the United Nations to be involved."

Also Tuesday, in the eastern province of Paktika, local police commander Azizullah Karwan said six Taliban militants were killed in a clash with one of his patrols.

He said no police were killed or injured.

In Ghazni, the neighboring province to the west, three local police were killed and three wounded in a gunbattle with the Taliban around midday, said district police chief Kasim Desiwal. Four Taliban fighters were killed, he said.

___

Associated Press writer David Rising contributed to this report from Kabul.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/taliban-hit-nato-supply-compound-kabul-kill-7-122612314.html

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Gay marriage opponents ask court to intervene

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) ? A wave of weddings were performed in San Francisco City Hall on the heels of the U.S. Supreme Court's historic decisions to restore same-sex marriages to California, as defeated backers of the state's gay marriage ban filed a last-ditch effort to halt the ceremonies.

Less than 24 hours after California started issuing marriage licenses to same sex couples, lawyers for the Arizona-based Alliance Defending Freedom filed an emergency petition to the high court Saturday asking it to halt the weddings on the grounds that its decision was not yet legally final. They claimed the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals acted prematurely and unfairly on Friday when it allowed gay marriage to resume by lifting a hold that had been placed on same sex unions.

The motion was filed as dozens of couples in jeans, shorts, white dresses and the occasional military uniform filled City Hall to obtain marriage licenses. On Friday, 81 same sex couples received marriage licenses.

Although a few clerk's offices around the state stayed open late on Friday, San Francisco, which is holding its annual gay pride celebration this weekend, was the only jurisdiction to hold weekend hours so that same sex couples could take advantage of their newly restored right, Clerk Karen Hong said.

A sign posted on the door of the office where a long line of couples waited to fill out applications listed the price for a license, a ceremony or both above the words "Equality=Priceless."

"We really wanted to make this happen," Hong said, adding that her whole staff and a group of volunteers came into work without having to be asked. "It's spontaneous, which is great in its own way."

The timing couldn't have been better for California National Guard Capt. Michael Potoczniak, 38, and his partner of 10 years, Todd Saunders, 47, of El Cerrito.

Potoczniak, who joined the Guard after the military's ban on openly gay service was repealed almost two years ago, was scheduled to fly out Sunday night for a month of basic training in Texas.

"I woke up this morning, shook him awake and said, 'Let's go,'" said Potoczniak, who chose to get married in his Army uniform. "It's something that people need to see because everyone is so used to uniforms at military weddings."

Also waiting to wed Saturday were Scott Kehoe, 34, and his fiance, Aurelien Bricker, 24. After finding out on Facebook that the city was issuing same sex marriage licenses Friday, the San Francisco couple rushed out to Tiffany's to buy wedding rings.

"We were afraid of further legal challenges in the state," Kehoe said.

The Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that Proposition 8's backers lacked standing to defend the 2008 law because California's governor and attorney general have declined to defend the ban.

Then on Friday, the 9th Circuit appeared to have removed the last obstacle to making same sex matrimony legal again in California when it removed its hold on a lower court's 2010 order directing state officials to stop enforcing the ban.

Within hours, same sex couples were seeking marriage licenses. The two couples who sued to overturn Proposition 8 were wed in San Francisco and Los Angeles Friday.

Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Austin Nimocks said on Saturday that the high court's consideration of the case isn't done because his clients still have 22 days to ask the justices to reconsider Wednesday's 5-4 decision.

Under Supreme Court rules, the losing side in a legal dispute has 25 days to request a rehearing. While such requests are almost never granted, the high court said that it wouldn't finalize its judgment in the case at least until after that waiting period elapsed.

The San Francisco-based appeals court had said when it imposed the stay that it would remain in place until the Supreme Court issued its final disposition, according to Nimocks.

"Everyone on all sides of the marriage debate should agree that the legal process must be followed," he said. "On Friday, the 9th Circuit acted contrary to its own order without explanation."

Many legal experts who had anticipated such a last-ditch effort by gay marriage opponents said it was unlikely to succeed because the 9th Circuit has independent authority over its own orders ? in this case, its 2010 stay.

While the ban's backers can still ask the Supreme Court for a rehearing, the 25-day waiting period is not binding on lower federal courts, Vikram Amar, a constitutional law professor with the University of California, Davis law school, said.

"As a matter of practice, most lower federal courts wait to act," Amar said. "But there is nothing that limits them from acting sooner. It was within the 9th Circuit's power to do what it did."

The city, home to both a federal trial court that struck down Proposition 8 as unconstitutional and the 9th Circuit, has been the epicenter of the state's gay marriage movement since then-Mayor Gavin Newsom ordered his administration in February 2004 to issue licenses to gay couples in defiance of state law.

A little more than four years later, the California Supreme Court, which is also based in San Francisco, struck down the state's one-man, one-woman marriage laws.

City Hall was the scene of many more marriages in the 4 1/2 months before a coalition of religious conservative groups successfully campaigned for the November 2008 passage of Proposition 8, which amended the state constitution to outlaw same sex marriages.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/gay-marriage-opponents-ask-court-intervene-210730914.html

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Kris Perry & Sandy Stier, Prop 8 Plaintiffs, Tie The Knot In California's First Gay Marriage In Over 4 Years

Proposition 8 plaintiffs Kris Perry and Sandy Stier experienced a huge victory earlier this week when the Supreme Court left California's gay marriage ban for dead. On Friday, the couple's triumph came full circle when they tied the knot in first same-sex marriage held in the state in four and a half years. The move was prompted when the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a surprise order dissolving a stay it had imposed on gay marriages during the legal challenge.

(Watch video of their ceremony above.)

Perry and Stier prepare to exchange vows in front of California Attorney General Kamala Harris:

(Photo via HuffPost's Robin Wilkey)

Perry and Stier celebrate after getting married:

(Photo via HuffPost's Robin Wilkey)

Read more from the Associated Press:

The lead plaintiffs in the U.S. Supreme Court case that overturned California's same-sex marriage ban tied the knot at San Francisco City Hall on Friday, about an hour after an appeals court cleared the way for same-sex couples to obtain marriage licenses for the first time in 4 1/2 years.

State Attorney General Kamala Harris presided at the wedding of Kris Perry and Sandy Stier, of Berkeley. The couple sued to overturn the state's voter-approved gay marriage ban along with Jeff Katami and Paul Zarrillo, of Burbank, who planned to marry Friday evening at Los Angeles City Hall.

"They have waited and fought for this moment," Harris said. "Today their wait is finally over."

Harris declared Perry, 48, and Stier, 50, "spouses for life," but during their vows, they took each other as "lawfully wedded wife."

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had issued a brief order Friday afternoon dissolving a stay it imposed on gay marriages while the lawsuit challenging Proposition 8 worked its way through the courts.

Sponsors of California's same-sex marriage ban said the appeals court's decision was "disgraceful."

Anthony Pugno, general counsel for a coalition of religious conservative groups, called the 9th Circuit's order an "outrageous act" by judges and politicians determined to overturn Proposition 8.

He called the court's decision an "abuse of power to manipulate the system and render the people voiceless."

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 Wednesday that the sponsors of California's voter-approved gay marriage ban lacked authority to defend the measure in court once Harris and Gov. Jerry Brown refused to do so.

The decision lets stand a trial judge's declaration that the ban, approved by voters in November 2008, violates the civil rights of gay Californians and cannot be enforced.

Under Supreme Court rules, the losing side in a legal dispute has 25 days to ask the high court to rehear the case. The court said earlier this week that it would not finalize its ruling in the Proposition 8 dispute until after that time had elapsed.

It was not immediately clear whether the appeals court's action would be halted by the high court.

Also on HuffPost:

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/28/kris-perry-sandy-stier-gay-marriage_n_3519462.html

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