Unemployment Falls, but Half a Million Jobless Sit Out

Leading the front pages today is the so-called good news about jobs, which is that the bleeding of them from the national economy has slowed. The Washington Post reports the "unemployment rate fell to 9.4 percent, from 9.5 percent in June, and employers slashed 247,000 jobs, the slowest rate of decline in nearly a year." Despite hopes the numbers foreshadow the recession's end, economists generally think unemployment will rise again before any long-term recovery. The figures are not due to any job creation miracles, says the Post: "422,000 people removed themselves from the labor force, essentially giving up the search for work." Still, the New York Times calls it "the most heartening employment report since last summer" and quotes Vice President Biden's economic adviser as saying the numbers would've been far worse without the stimulus passed earlier this year. Another Times story notes a lack of job growth in the private sector over the last decade.

A Times analysis tracks the wildly swinging pendulum of opinion on Obama's economic team by asking, "What if in the end they got it right?" The economists at Barclay's Capital concur, having said yesterday that "[i]t's over," meaning the "Great Recession."

The Wall Street Journal continues its series on congressional spending by reporting on an 11-day "global-warming trip" taken by 10 members of Congress and six spouses. The members studied the problem up close: "They went diving and snorkeling at the Great Barrier Reef. They also rode a cable car through the Australian rain forest, visited a penguin rookery and flew to the South Pole." The Journal also reports that Congress allotted itself eight new jets worth $550 million, despite a recommendation from the Defense Department to buy just four planes.

Airbus could face more problems, reports the AP, as the airspeed sensors suspected to be at fault in the Air France crash over the Atlantic Ocean in June have "also malfunctioned on at least a dozen recent Northwest Airlines flights." The sensors are already being replaced in many Airbus A330s, the model that crashed, but the new data could accelerate that process.

The Post has more on the outages on social networking sites Twitter and Facebook. They may have been due to an attack on a Georgian political blogger who reports on tensions with Russia. "It looks like Twitter and Facebook were just caught up in the collateral damage from an attack on this one blogger's site," one security expert said.

The new General Motors (MTLQQ) will IPO by July 10, 2010, one year after its exit from bankruptcy, reports Bloomberg. The carmaker and its competitors have all been buoyed by the success of the Cash for Clunkers program, which will get a $2 billion infusion from Congress, says the Times. The Post reports that startup automaker Coda will beat GM to market with its electric car, which is actually a platform for a plethora of suppliers and designers, since the company doesn't even own its own factory.